Translation and Interpreting Studies. The Journal of the American Translation and Interpreting Studies Association - Volume 8, Issue 1, 2013

In Nazi concentration camps the prisoners were frequently of 30 to 40 different nationalities, and German and Polish Jews were in the majority. With German as the only official language in the lager, communication was vital for the prisoners’ survival. In the last few decades, there has been extensive research on the language inmates used (referred to as “lagerszpracha,” “lagerjargon,” or “Krematorium-Esperanto”); investigation, however, of the mediating role of interpreters between SS guards and prisoners, on the one hand, and among inmates, on the other, has been nearly inexistent. This paper claims that the different kinds of interpreting activities shaped the everyday life in concentration camps considerably. In what way has interpreting contributed to the survival of the deported? Did interpreting have an impact on the hierarchical order imposed on the prisoners? What metaphors can best describe the interpreting activity in order to convey the extreme terror the lager prisoners experienced? These questions will be explored through a series of survivor accounts.

This paper argues that corpus use in translation and the Facebook non-professional crowdsourcing model both aim to create more natural-sounding translations. A number of studies on corpus use support this hypothesis, but, to date, there have been no empirical studies on whether crowdsourcing translations produces texts that comply with the conventions users expect, consequently appearing more natural. After a theoretical discussion on how corpus use and Facebook crowdsourcing both intend to achieve more naturally sounding translations, the empirical study contrasts the crowdsourced Peninsular Spanish version of Facebook to original Spanish social networking sites. The methodology is based on a comparable corpus (Baker 1995) and compares all the interactive segments, such as navigation menus and dialog boxes, in this version of Facebook to a similar corpus extracted from the top 25 social networks locally produced in Spain. The contrastive analyses focus on verbal use and terminological conventions. The results confirm that the linguistic features examined in Facebook and produced through a crowdsourced non-professional model match those found in the corpus of non-translated networking sites.

The article analyzes the reasons for Hemingway’s powerful impact on the Soviet culture from the 1930s through the early 1980s. I suggest that this influence was created not so much by Hemingway himself as by the way his works were translated and presented to the readers in the Soviet Union. In particular, the article examines the style of translation employed by a cohesive collective of Russian-Soviet translators (the Kashkíntsy) in their translations of Hemingway’s works that came to be identified with the “Soviet school of translation.” The translators used a distinctive set of linguostylistic means consisting, to a significant extent, in enhancing the expressive properties of the Hemingway originals in their Russian translations. The resultant translated texts not only affected the behavior of a significant part of especially the male population of the Soviet Union but also set the stage for establishing a distinctive “American style” of writing within the mainstream Soviet literature. In other words, the Soviet translators collectively invented Hemingway’s style that made their translated texts sparkle in Russian.

As education programs preparing interpreters for legal settings gain visibility in academia, the need to analyze the associated teaching and learning processes becomes more pressing. Voids in interpreter education can be as simple as a lack of consensus on the profession’s name (court, judicial, or legal interpreting or interpretation) or as fundamental as how to assess student learning outcomes and even what those outcomes should be. The lack of research to assist in the development of standards and teaching methodologies in interpreter education prompted the authors to conduct a study of interpreting programs and courses taught in colleges and universities in the United States. The study sought to identify the level of courses taught, faculty credentials, similarities and differences in pedagogy, the use or development of tools to assess student learning outcomes, and other characteristics of the programs. The study is expected to provide the basis not just for further research, but also engagement between academia and key stakeholders to fill voids in interpreter education and contribute to the development of teaching standards and methodologies for the field.

Interpreting between a minority language speaker or user (a service user or client) and a representative of an authority (service provider) is frequently referred to as Community Interpreting. One of the challenges of such triadic communication between linguistically and culturally diverse participants is to establish who may speak for how long in order to maintain meaningful communication without any loss of information. At first glance, the service provider emerges as the apparent figure of authority, while the client often provides significant input concerning the content of the encounter. Nevertheless, the final responsibility for the information transfer rests with the interpreter. This article reports on how participants of a study conducted in the area of interpreting in mental healthcare in Dublin, Ireland viewed the issue of communication control. Interview respondents of the research, who comprised mental health professionals and interpreters working in mental healthcare, revealed that there is a constantly fluctuating delicate balance regarding the control of the communication flow when an interpreter is involved in an encounter between a service user and a service provider.

This article investigates the impact of interpreting within the discursive frame of the free recall element in forensic interview formats. The delivery of a prompted free recall has been shown to yield evidence of a better quality than that obtained through elicited accounts; free recall, therefore, constitutes a central technique in investigative interviewing. Police institutional discourse associates specific discursive behavior and conversational resources with free recall. Drawing on experimental data, this paper analyzes several effects of interpreting on achieving and maintaining free recall. The following topics are feature in this paper: the frame transition from the interviewer-led opening section to the delivery of a free narrative; the meta-talk that arises regarding interpreting; and the segmentation of the interpreted free recall and the coordination of turn-taking. The article discusses instances of misalignment between the functional goals of free recall and the interpreting-related strategies the interviewer and the interpreter adopt. This analysis demonstrates the contextual nature of “quality” as defined in institutional face-to-face interpreting and highlights discursive expertise as a central component in the professionalization of Public Service Interpreting.