Translation and Interpreting Studies. The Journal of the American Translation and Interpreting Studies Association - Current Issue

The present research, which focuses on the rarely examined dynamic reception process, aims to extend and enrich the current discussion of the role of translation in colonial and postcolonial history. Based on a case study of George Jamieson’s English translation of the Qing Code, this study examines how this translation operates in Hong Kong courts, paying special attention to judges and expert witnesses, who interact closely with Jamieson’s work. The cooperative and competing relationship between experts and Jamieson’s translation sheds light on the centrality of the translator’s imperial experience, highlighting both the colonizing and decolonizing roles of the translation. Moreover, the findings illustrate that Jamieson’s imperial experience facilitates the court’s acceptance, on the one hand, while making his translation obsolete and subject to challenges from experts, on the other.

In the capstone unit of a Master of Translation, students were required to write “judicious” interventions (Lefevere 1996) by way of peritextual commentary, be it an introduction, a preface, or a postface. Such interventions are at heart a reaction against the well-documented translators’ invisibility. The hope is that studying patterns of published translators’ interventions of this type and teaching trainee translators to write their own will foster self-reflexivity, confidence and “the virtues of courage and determination” (Chesterman 2001). The article describes how learners were encouraged to meet this outcome, the tasks involved, and how some students in the 2020 cohort fared. It concludes with some suggestions on how to promote best practice in teaching to combat translators’ invisibility.

This study employs four purpose-built corpora to assess the frequency of the disfluency marker uh (emm) in Chinese-English consecutive interpreting (CI) renditions as a proxy measure of interpreters’ cognitive load. Based on Plevoets and Defrancq (2016, 2018), the frequencies are compared across four informational load indicators: delivery rate, lexical density, proportion of numbers, and sentence length. The analysis also probes the potential influence of interpreting directionality on disfluencies. Results reveal differential effects of the four informational load indicators on disfluencies and, by extension, interpreters’ cognitive load, while Chinese-to-English CI is associated with an increase in disfluencies compared to English-to-Chinese for interpreters with Chinese as their A language.

Based on data obtained from semi-structured interviews with legal aid lawyers in Australia, this study examines lawyers’ experience of working with interpreters in confidential legal settings. These interviews focused on lawyers’ knowledge of the interpreting profession and their expectations of interpreting services. The findings show that lawyers overall possess a sound knowledge of how to work with interpreters, as evidenced in their recognition of the interpreter’s ethical role, their awareness of the need to accommodate the interpreter’s professional needs, and their ability to use various strategies to evaluate interpreting quality. In terms of lawyers’ expectations, they value interpreters speaking the right dialect, being patient, and complying with ethical requirements. The lawyers’ expectations of interpreting services are closely related to their professional goal. However, lawyers raise serious issues about telephone interpreting, including interpreters not working in a secure location and engaging in other activities during interpreting.

This article analyzes texts that have been generated by machine translation (MT) and post-edited by native English-speaking trainee translators (English>Chinese) who are also Chinese language learners enrolled in a four-year undergraduate translation program. The project examines the work product of trainee translators to categorize 122 errors that are (un)noticed and (un)corrected by them. MT errors in the Accuracy category were best identified and corrected, followed by those in the Lexicon and Fluency categories. Trainee translators who were advanced language learners outperformed the intermediate group in MT error detection and correction, especially in the Lexicon category. This study sheds light upon the use of raw MT output as meaningful input for trainee translators who are in the process of learning Chinese. Its findings provide information regarding the type of exercises needed in language learning and translation training for students with different levels of language proficiency.

This article reports on the linguistic and cultural adaptation of Items of the National Quality of Life Survey (NQLS 2018), which are included in a National Survey that explores the availability of reasonable accommodation for Deaf users in a health care setting as well as health care access. We document the cultural and linguistic adaptation step-by-step, guided by a literature review, participatory group discussions, and qualitative testing. This research addresses the dearth of accessible research instruments for D‍/‍deaf persons in low and middle-income countries. This lack of accessible tools leads to double layers of exclusion, and data gaps often lead to erroneous generalizations that do not accurately represent D‍/‍deaf populations. Evidence gaps may result in poor service planning and inadequate policymaking. This study contributes to good practices in language interpreting in research settings, disability research, and global health.