Translation and Interpreting Studies. The Journal of the American Translation and Interpreting Studies Association - Volume 2, Issue 1, 2007

This study examines the translation of the French terms maman and papa by English-language translators from the nineteenth century to the present. Following a comparative analysis of the semantics of the French terms and of their most typical English translations, the authors of the study isolate trends in the translation of these terms through analysis of corpora of French and Quebecois literary texts and their translations.

The authors of this study apply discourse analysis to the Arabic<>English interpretation performed by Mohamed Yousry for Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman and his lawyer, Lynn Stewart. The article begins with a review of the latest research in the field that highlights the interpreter’s role as co-participant in the communicative event, debunking the traditional notion of the interpreter as conduit. On the basis of transcripts of videotaped interviews between Abdel-Rahman and Stewart with Yousry acting as interpreter, the authors analyze the particular ways in which Yousry exercised his agency as a co-participant. By creating an Arabic-centered discourse, Yousry effectively marginalized Stewart while placing Abdel-Rahman in a discursive position of authority. This study is an example of the research necessary to develop best practices for interpreters that acknowledge their agency in the interpreted communicative event.

This article reports on a study designed to quantify temporal and technical post-editing effort in machine translated texts. The study involved two groups of English>German translators, one instructed to post-edit a machine-translated text and the other to translate the same text from English into German. In addition, text segments containing negative translatability indicators (NTIs) were isolated in order to compare the effort involved in post-editing and translating segments with such indicators and without. Results indicate that the post-editing effort for all segments was lower than the translation effort for those segments. Additional results suggest, among other things, that the removal of NTIs may reduce relative post-editing effort overall.

This study was designed to analyze the comparative use of punctuation marks in Russian and English newspaper editorials. The study was conducted using corpora of English-language editorials, taken from the New York Times in 2005, and of Russian-language editorials, taken from Izvestiia in the same year. Results indicated that the comma, colon, and the em-dash were used more often in the Russian corpus. The difference was determined to be statistically significant. The author then compared these results to the results of punctuation use in corpora of Russian and English literary texts. Again these punctuation marks were used more frequently in the Russian literary corpus than in the English one. At the same time, in both the Russian and English literary corpora these marks were used much more frequently than in the corpora of Russian and English editorials. In the second part of the article, the author attempts to isolate the reasons for the discrepancy in use of the colon by examining rules for its use as elaborated in authoritative Russian and English style guides. On the basis of this, the author suggests guidelines for the translation of the colon into English.

This article reports on a study which is a small step toward the exploration of translational exchange of ideas and practices among academic disciplines and across languages and cultures. It presents results of an ongoing longitudinal study auditing the cultural performance of resources made available to foreign scholars at universities in Canada and concludes by discussing implications for future study of the intersection between academic self-translation and cross-cultural communication.