Translation and Interpreting Studies. The Journal of the American Translation and Interpreting Studies Association - Volume 6, Issue 1, 2011

In 1995, Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman was convicted for his role in the 1993 plot to bomb the World Trade Center. In 2002, Abdel-Rahman’s attorney Lynne Stewart and his interpreter Mohammed Yousry were arrested and charged with aiding terrorism. The crux of the evidence against them came from their jail visits with Abdel-Rahman. This article examines the roles of Abdel-Rahman, Stewart, and Yousry during those visits. It argues that due to factors such as ethnicity, gender, and religious background, the Arabic language and its related cultural discourse became the central context of interaction. The article focuses on three main facets of this interaction: Arabic-English vis-à-vis English-Arabic translations, Yousry’s mediation of relations through Arabic-centered cultural phenomena, and Stewart’s acceptance of — and to a certain extent participation in — an Arabic-centered discourse through her use of Arabic phrases (particularly religious ones). Twelve segments have been selected from the transcripts to illustrate these phenomena in this situation of violent conflict, which is highly relevant in today’s politically charged climate.

The Norwegian children’s novel Nattfuglene was translated into Arabic Ṭuyūr al-layl via English The Night Birds. In the process, adaptations were made, reflecting translators’ domesticating or foreignizing strategies. The article addresses these adaptations, the role of the relay version, and what appears to be ‘culture context adaptations’ with regard to sensitive issues in the Arab target culture.

This paper analyzes the comparative usage of punctuation marks in translated (English>Spanish) and non-translated newspaper articles. Excerpts were extracted from the online International News sections published in the US and Mexico by Reuters and the Associated Press. Hypothesis testing and corpus-based descriptive statistics were used to study the frequency of usage of punctuation marks, such as commas, periods, colons, semicolons, en-dashes and em-dashes, as well as sentence length, in translated and non-translated texts in the context of journalistic writing. Results from the analysis reveal a tendency to carry over periods, colons and em-dashes from English source texts into translated Spanish texts, producing a source language residual effect or ‘translationese.’ Data gathered from concordancing tools also suggest a residual effect in the usage of commas and semicolons, as well as in sentencing. These results reflect, among other factors, a lack of adherence to style guide conventions.

This empirical study is aimed to investigate how translation students in Chinese universities are introduced to, use, and evaluate online resources in Chinese-English translation. One hundred translation students were randomly selected from a leading foreign languages university in China and were asked to complete a questionnaire. It was found that: (1) translation students now rely more on electronic resources than non-electronic ones in their translation practice, the underlying reason being convenience rather than accuracy; and (2) with online resources, translation efficiency is improved. It is hoped that the current study will fill, to some extent, the research gap in the application of online resources in translation practice, and therefore shed some new light on translator training.

Based on the comparison of intertextual references in several English translations of Fedor Dostoevskii’s Notes From the Underground and Victor Pelevin’s “The Ninth Dream of Vera Pavlovna,” the article addresses general issues of translating intertextual references in narratives. Special attention is devoted to the problems of reception of postmodern texts and the question of the translator’s ‘invisibility.’