Translation and Interpreting Studies. The Journal of the American Translation and Interpreting Studies Association - Volume 17, Issue 1, 2022

The article examines religious translations associated with communities of German-speaking refugees in mid-seventeenth-century Britain, namely: a mystical treatise circulating among the non-conformist Family of Love, and the writings of Jacob Böhme, which enjoyed a surprisingly wide reception in English print. The discussion focuses on the textual-material features of these texts, as they represent tangible traces of the activities of seventeenth-century networks connecting German-speaking exiles, English translators, and their many intermediaries. The printed books record the circulation of those texts across dissident communities, but also their passage from clandestine manuscripts to widely-distributed printed texts, and the transformations that accompany their dissemination on the English book market. By examining together the discursive, textual, and material features of these translations, this essay foregrounds the importance of combining descriptive translation studies and book studies as complementary approaches when documenting early modern histories of cultural transfer, displacement and exile.

This contribution deals with the use of Google Translate as one among many resources that participants mobilize to overcome the language barrier in plurilingual medical consultations. It is grounded on a two-hour interaction involving a family of Albanian asylum seekers newly arrived in France and a French general practitioner. To reach mutual comprehension, participants rely on the mediation of a lay interpreter (one of the family’s children) who translates for the doctor and the other family members. In this interaction, English is used as a lingua franca, while machine translation is conducted between French and Albanian. The analysis will focus on the interactional work that participants accomplish in order to: (1) propose or solicit the use of Google Translate and make the computer accessible to all participants; (2) detect and repair misunderstandings caused by an unsuitable translation.

Through the material orientation of actor network theory and its understanding of “translation,” this article provides insight into what students and interpreters experience from moment to moment at less visible levels of a spoken language interpreted university lecture. It reveals the arduous conditions in which interpreters must make decisions in the blink of an eye while nonhuman actors often restrict their choices. The data show a disconnect between interpreters and their material environment, which impairs their ability to “enroll” their users and to enable their “translation” into academics with full membership in their communities of practice. The article proposes a negotiated rearrangement of the space that integrates interpreters in a cohesive and enabling material environment. On a conceptual level it proposes a redefinition of role that provides them with the agency to manage the challenges that arise from moment to moment in the real-life conditions of an interpreted university lecture.

Several non-profit organizations provide asylum claimants in Hong Kong a platform to engage in activities that help them integrate into the local community. These activities include sharing food and recipes with the aim of introducing Hongkongers to refugee cultures. Based on interviews with representatives from two charities and analysis of two cookbooks and a website with food-related refugee stories, this article investigates food preparation by asylum seekers as a translation activity influenced by food materiality and its cultural significance. The analysis reveals how food and its preparation, when examined as community translation events and products, serves as a tool for intercultural mediation that allows refugees and asylum seekers to communicate their culture and negotiate their place in the local community, helping establish meaningful connections with the local population.

The relation between translation and experiences of migrants as depicted in fiction has been widely discussed, through the lens of both interlingual translation and cultural translation. The latter refers to the ongoing negotiation and representation of one’s values, symbols, and practices vis-à-vis the local majority group. The link between cultural translation and interlingual translation deserves careful exploration. This article examines the interface between these translational concepts through their intersections with two material diasporic objects in Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s Queen of Dreams. The first object is the dream journals, handwritten in Bengali by the late mother of the young protagonist and translated into English by her father. The second object comprises culinary items and the interlingual procedures related to them. The analysis showcases various ways in which interlingual translation may provoke and participate in cultural translation within the context of diasporic literature.

In their migration, people carry objects with them, and relocate them through physical spaces and across cultural boundaries. Handed down through generations, these objects become signs of ethnicity beyond their appearance and purpose. Examining the variety of the literary representations of objects and their subsequent translation contributes to the analysis of how material culture migrates within distant cultural systems and from one language to another. This essay focuses on domestic objects depicted by two Italian authors writing about the experience of a migrant coming-of-age in the United States: Helen Barolini and Chiara Barzini. Using diverse multilingual and (self-)translation strategies, they highlight through cultural translation the difficulties of bridging their Italian and American selfhood within an Italian household relocated abroad. In doing so, their relationship with objects underlines how their diasporic experience is entangled with their achievement of self-confidence and independence as women within the context of the Italian diaspora.