Translation and Interpreting Studies. The Journal of the American Translation and Interpreting Studies Association - Volume 18, Issue 3, 2023

Nikolai Gogol (Ukrainian: Mykola Hoholʹ) is a notable example of a nineteenth-century Russian author of Ukrainian origin, whose works in Ukrainian translation have always been and now remain ideologically fraught. This article discusses the dynamics of translation – from creative stylization to awkward literalism – during the period from the late 1920s to the early 1950s. Later Ukrainian editions of Gogol’s works in the Ukrainian SSR were not substantially different from those published in the mid-1950s, which indicates that by that time the Soviet model of Ukrainian literary language had been firmly established. It tended to increasingly merge with Russian, taking the Russian-language writings of Gogol as a model. The study reveals a tension between Ukrainian national idealism and the Soviet regime’s pragmatic use of language as a means of political propaganda. The discussion further challenges Russian-to-Ukrainian literalism as a strategy for manufacturing linguistic similarities and “naturalizing” Russian as the mother tongue.

This article examines translation strategies applied in the Russian version of Mariama Bâ’s francophone novel Une si longue lettre (USLL). The novel, which is often described as feminist, was translated into Russian during the period of late socialism, which was characterized by gradual societal changes involving the liberalization of the social order. Drawing on Spivak’s theorization of the subaltern and feminist translation, this article explores how the francophone African novel was translated into Russian and how specifically Soviet feminist discourses are reflected in the translation. Ultimately, this article argues that, by employing feminist translation strategies, the subaltern women characters in USLL were represented as less dependent on patriarchal structures and ‘inserted’ into the target culture as hegemonic subjects.

Film criticism in China has been changing due to a growing fan community and their active participation in online film reviewing. While social media has democratized who can write reviews, there remain distinct hierarchies of professional and amateur reviewers. Drawing upon Henry Jenkins’ (2006b) concept of “knowledge community” and Alex Bruns’ “produsage” model (2008), this article will explore how Chinese film fans use translation to shape the online reception of a film and participate in the debates over film criticism in the digital age. Through a case study of the Chinese translations of an English review of The Wandering Earth (2019), a Chinese sci-fi blockbuster, it argues that translation, as an alternative form of self-expression, constitutes both an important cinematic experience for fans and a response by grassroots consumers to the existing reviewing system influenced by media capital.

Facing a new technological turn, the field of interpreting is in great need of evidence on the effectiveness of computer-assisted interpreting. This study proposes a computer-assisted consecutive interpreting (CACI) mode incorporating speech recognition (SR) and machine translation (MT). First, the interpreter listens to the source speech and respeaks it into an SR system, creating an SR text which is then processed by an MT system. Second, the interpreter produces a target speech with reference to the SR and MT texts. Six students participated in training on CACI, after which they performed consecutive interpreting in both the conventional and the new mode. The study finds that CACI featured fewer pauses and reduced cognitive load. Moreover, the overall interpreting quality, especially the accuracy, was increased. The effectiveness of the new mode is found to be modulated by the interpreting direction.

The prospect of automated scoring for interpreting fluency has prompted investigations into the predictability of human raters’ perceived fluency based on acoustically measured utterance fluency. Recently, Han, Chen, Fu and Fan (2020) correlated ten utterance fluency measures with raters’ perceived fluency ratings. To verify previous correlational patterns, the present study partially replicated Han et al. (2020). Our analysis shows that most of the correlations observed in Han et al. (2020) were successfully replicated. To produce overall interim estimates of the true relationships, we conducted a mini meta-analysis of correlation coefficients reported in six relevant studies, informed by the “continuously cumulating meta-analysis” approach (Braver et al. 2014). We found that phonation time ratio, mean length of run, and speech rate had relatively strong correlations with perceived fluency. We discuss these findings in light of automated fluency assessment and the need for replication and meta-analysis in translation and interpreting studies.

This article applies Comparative Interpreting Studies to research on interpreting in religious contexts and the relevance of this literature to interpreting studies more broadly. Comparative Interpreting Studies is an approach that looks to plot the commonalities of all interpreting practice. It is argued that actual observed interpreter behaviors, rather than assumed professional standards, provide a justifiable unit of comparison. The behavior of interpreters in religious contexts is discussed, alongside the split between prescriptive and descriptive approaches to analyzing this behavior and the importance of spiritual and emotional aspects. Differences in research approaches on interpreting in religious contexts are shown to shadow debates within interpreting studies and thus offer insights that may be cautiously generalized. Such generalizations align with recent research in a variety of interpreting contexts and lead to a call for interpreting researchers to give more attention to the wider social, organizational, and personal contexts of interpreting.

Although metaphors are one of the most challenging problems in translation, their treatment is still understudied under the specific constraints of audiovisual translation. The research is especially scarce regarding empirical reception studies as most research is product or process but not user-oriented. The main questions that the present study aims to answer are what are the general preferences and expectations of viewers regarding the translation strategies used for rendering metaphors in subtitling and what could be the underlying reasons for these. To this end, we conducted an experiment with 322 participants and compared the results with a semi-structured interview with 53 participants. The results suggest that viewers prefer a domesticated approach both for lexicalized and non-lexicalized metaphors except for visualized metaphors regardless of their level of transculturality. The potential underlying reasons for this are also discussed.