Translation and Interpreting Studies. The Journal of the American Translation and Interpreting Studies Association - Volume 16, Issue 3, 2021

This article argues that the use of interpreting settings as theoretical categories is no longer empirically sound. Instead, research should focus on the commonalities of all interpreting practice. This move is viewed as an enabling shift for the creation of Comparative Interpreting Studies, a strand dedicated to considering interpreting as a global practice. After discussing the rationale for the current use of interpreting settings as analytical categories, evidence from a variety of existing settings is used to illustrate the commonalities between all instances of interpreting and the fuzziness of the boundaries between these settings. It is argued that using interpreting settings leads to silo thinking, where researchers focus on research in the setting in which they are working, even when findings from other settings can be applied. The article ends with a discussion of the theoretical and practical potential of this move including the power of a comparative approach.

Integrated university programs for deaf and hearing sign language interpreting students are rare. In Finland, deaf interpreting students have been integrated in the only university program for sign language interpreting since its beginning in the early 2000s. This article investigates the experiences of the deaf interpreting students and deaf sign language interpreters (n = 5) who attend and have attended the program. We analyzed interview responses using critical discourse analysis and the concept of identity construction, and found that deaf interpreting students, despite some disadvantages, benefited from the integrated program. We also found three identity positions – competent deaf identity, student identity, and professional DI identity – and support for recognition (Honneth 1996) in both the solidarity and legal sphere developed through the program.

In the build-up to the annexation of Crimea in 2014, Russia’s state-owned media pushed a nationalist-imperialist narrative according to which Crimea is ethnically and historically Russian, and should, therefore, return to the Russian Motherland. This article underscores the critical role of news translation in the debate around the status of Crimea and in the circulation of global news, more generally. It focuses on the Russian website InoSMI, a portal that monitors and translates foreign press, during the peak of the Crimea crisis. Our analysis reveals that Russian translations reframe Western reports in such a way as to over-emphasize ties between Russia and Crimea. Drawing on both ethnonationalist and imperialist narratives that capitalize on the place Crimea holds in Russian imagination, and exploiting old metaphors of brotherhood, InoSMI promotes specific definitions of Russian space and identity that legitimize an aggressive foreign policy.

After implementing of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) for four years, the Chinese government convened the BRI Summits in Beijing in 2017 and 2019, respectively. This article will address the questions of how the summits were covered in translated news by using empirical data from news published on the Reference News, a state-owned newspaper that publishes translated news, in comparison to news carried in People’s Daily, an authoritative national newspaper in China. Situated in the framework of political discourse analysis (PDA) within critical discourse analysis (CDA) and using the method of qualitative thematic analysis, the study shows that translated news is a platform where contentious ideologies are at play and where dominant ones leave little room for the confrontational. In this process, translators are submissive actors whose work is navigated by the agenda set by the authorities in either legitimizing or representing frames in mainstream media.

This article presents a descriptive study of the English translations of the classic Chinese novel Jin Ping Mei in the context of the Anglo-American literary censorship of obscenity in the twentieth century. By scrutinizing the strategies employed in the English translations of Jin Ping Mei, this article uncovers the dynamic interactions between literary translation activities and the evolving socio-historical contexts in the target culture. The resurrection of the archaic source text, particularly its erotic component, in the Anglophone world in the twentieth century was based on the (re)discovery of its value in the contemporary target context. In the case of Jin Ping Mei, equivalence at the linguistic and textual levels was simply not a concern of the translators and publishers, who had to decide how they would deal with the social reality of literary censorship, by submissively conforming to its demands, or by creatively confronting them.

Until now, investigations of strategies used by signed language interpreters in the simultaneous mode have been sporadic and restricted to analyses of short transcripts. This article presents the first corpus-driven exploration of interpreter additions in news broadcasts simultaneously interpreted into South African Sign Language. Using grounded theory, it explores the types of additions made, the reasons for their production, and their downstream consequences. The results show that interpreters mainly add discourse markers, linguistic extrapolations such as filling in ellipsis and obvious co-text, repetitions, contextual information, and to a lesser extent, second translations, pragmatic markers, and new information. However, the cost is high as additions often result in concomitant omissions and occasional incoherence. From the results, a model is extrapolated to explain additions in terms of the interpreter’s perceived roles and status in the Deaf community.

Advertisements often use poetic methods to increase aesthetic value, evoke emotion, and strengthen recipients’ impression. This study explores the cognitive poetics of English-Chinese advertisement translation and investigates how poetic methods are treated in translation. It draws upon poetics, psychology, and translation to study a corpus of 198 English-Chinese poetic advertisements. Two major poetic methods in the advertising discourse – repetition and image establishment – will be outlined, as well as their functions in invoking an emotional response and lasting impression. Then, analysis of a representative example will demonstrate how the poetic elements are transferred across languages, and the results of two surveys confirm their effects. The discussion is intended to shed light on the audience’s reception and perception of advertisements and provide translators with practical reference regarding poetic methods and the importance of the audience’s emotion and impression.