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- Volume 18, Issue 1, 2023
Translation and Interpreting Studies. The Journal of the American Translation and Interpreting Studies Association - Volume 18, Issue 1, 2023
Volume 18, Issue 1, 2023
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Steering ethics toward social justice
Author(s): Julie Boéripp.: 1–26 (26)More LessAbstractThe interpreting field has not been impervious to the call for dismantling patterns of injustice that extend down to the communication encounter. However, its engagement with socio-political commitment and change remains largely constrained by a deontological and liberal tradition. To decenter interpreting from this tradition and to steer its ethics toward social justice, this paper proposes a meta-ethical approach to and a model of interpreting. It explores activist interpreting in the global justice movement from three complementary standpoints: interpreting in the encounter (micro), politics of organization (macro) and enquiry (meso). The case study shows that social justice does not only concern the leverage of citizens’ benefits in the welfare state, but also consists of a communicational and social performance. The model can equip researchers to harness the liberatory potential of praxes, discourses and epistemologies found in the social movement milieu to refashion ethical language and thought in the field.
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The translator as rereader
Author(s): Sohomjit Raypp.: 27–50 (24)More LessAbstractA. K. Ramanujan’s complicated invocations of fidelity in the paratexts of his pioneering translations have invited analyses that focus on contradictions and paradoxes in his translation theory and practice. Providing a brief historical overview of translation in the South Asian context, this article contextualizes fidelity as a colonial remnant produced due to Ramanujan’s need to move between two disparate models of translation. Emphasizing Ramanujan’s identity as a poet-translator, I claim that his translation practice should be seen to have a poetics of its own; the impression of contradiction or paradox is resolved and the colonial remnant of fidelity decentralized if we consider this poetics to be a deeply hermeneutic act. I describe Ramanujan’s translation poetics to be defined by rereading, such that the translator is not just a reader nor fully a writer, but one who straddles both roles with ease to exist in community with other readers.
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Piracy and the commodification of originality in translation
Author(s): Lintao Qipp.: 51–69 (19)More LessAbstractTranslation is often considered in relation to the original, as if the original were always singular, fixed, stable, and incontestable. Readers, translators, and publishers, however, may approach the concept of original(ity) from diverse perspectives, conditioned by specific sociocultural contexts. Using Chinese translations of the Australian novel The Thorn Birds as a case study, this article situates its examination of original(ity) in the context of Chinese publishing industries, in which copyright laws and piracy unusually co-exist. The resultant tension between authorized publishers and counterfeiters gives rise to a situation where originality is highly commodified and thus frequently reconstructed. Translation research on original(ity), therefore, must move beyond legal and ethical dimensions to include economic, political, and historical contexts. Original(ity), which may be considered a collective property of both the original(s) and the translation(s), has to be constantly reinterpreted in a given sociocultural context at each new historical moment.
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A call for community-informed translation
Author(s): Remy Attigpp.: 70–90 (21)More LessAbstractThis article considers the Spanish and French translations of nonbinary pronouns in Netflix’s One Day at a Time, a social-justice-oriented sitcom. The article compares the source text with six parallel translations taken from one episode and isolates two main translation strategies. In the first strategy, translators rely on calque translations from English that demonstrate a misunderstanding of the source text. The second strategy shows an active engagement on the part of translators with Hispanic and Francophone Queer communities, replicating authentic Queer language practices. The article goes on to describe the implications of both strategies on reception and outlines several reasons why community-informed translation should be established as a best practice for Queer-oriented texts.
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How subtitling professionals perceive changes in working conditions
Author(s): Alexander Künzlipp.: 91–112 (22)More LessAbstractThe job of a subtitler is undergoing significant changes. This study investigates subtitling professionals’ perceptions of the effects these changes are having on their working conditions. With this aim in mind, an email interview study was conducted with nineteen freelance subtitling professionals producing German-language subtitles. Overall themes in the subtitlers’ accounts were disillusion with recent trends in the subtitling profession (the precarization of the subtitling profession, acceleration of production processes, virtualization of collaboration), concerns about quality (unavailable or low-quality working materials, market entry of unskilled subtitlers, replacement of established local subtitling guidelines by international ones, machine translation), but also opportunities (predictability, solidarity among subtitling professionals). Suggestions for future directions concern longitudinal studies to evaluate the effects changes in professional subtitling practice have on working conditions over time with follow-up surveys to collect subtitlers’ opinions on how the problems identified could best be tackled.
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The X-word
Author(s): Ainsley Morsepp.: 113–138 (26)More LessAbstractThis article describes changes in the use of profanity in contemporary Russian poetry and its implications for translation into English. While Russian poetry now more closely resembles English-language poetry in embracing the profanity typical of conversational speech, the highly taboo nature of Russian profanity is still relevant, including gender-specific taboos. Using examples from a range of female and male poets from the 2000s and 2010s (including Dina Gatina, Elena Fanailova, Dmitri Prigov, Andrei Rodionov, Alexander Skidan, Oksana Vasyakina, Lida Yusupova and others), the article explores the ambivalent status of profane language today, whereby the same phrase for different speakers can be considered entirely unremarkable or profoundly taboo. In addition to the exigencies of poetic form, this is the most relevant factor (and vexing problem) for Russian-to-English translation. Special attention is also paid to specifically queer uses of profanity, with the suggestion that profanity is perhaps best translated in a maximally expressive sociolect-specific way.
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First encounters
Author(s): Florin-Stefan Morarpp.: 139–158 (20)More LessAbstractThis article examines the earliest extant translations from Chinese in the period of the first systematic encounters between Chinese and Europeans in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It argues that agents of the Spanish and Portuguese empires in the context of early modern colonialism devised practical and effective social and linguistic approaches for translating Chinese. The article investigates three such approaches: the use of Chinese interpreters who learned European languages; the use of oral translation in the collaboration between Chinese and European interpreters; and the use of Europeans fluent in Chinese translating themselves.
Volumes & issues
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Volume 19 (2024)
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Volume 18 (2023)
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Volume 17 (2022)
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Volume 16 (2021)
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Volume 15 (2020)
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Volume 14 (2019)
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Volume 13 (2018)
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Volume 12 (2017)
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Volume 11 (2016)
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Volume 10 (2015)
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Volume 9 (2014)
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Volume 8 (2013)
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Volume 7 (2012)
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Volume 6 (2011)
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Volume 5 (2010)
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Volume 4 (2009)
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Volume 3 (2008)
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Volume 2 (2007)
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Volume 1 (2006)
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