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Translation and Interpreting Studies. The Journal of the American Translation and Interpreting Studies Association - Online First
Online First articles are the published Version of Record, made available as soon as they are finalized and formatted. They are in general accessible to current subscribers, until they have been included in an issue, which is accessible to subscribers to the relevant volume
20 results
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The cognitive poetics of English-Chinese advertisement translation
Author(s): Ying CuiAvailable online: 17 March 2021More LessAbstractAdvertisements often use poetic methods to increase aesthetic value, evoke emotion, and strengthen recipients’ impression. This study explores the cognitive poetics of English-Chinese advertisement translation and investigates how poetic methods are treated in translation. It draws upon poetics, psychology, and translation to study a corpus of 198 English-Chinese poetic advertisements. Two major poetic methods in the advertising discourse – repetition and image establishment – will be outlined, as well as their functions in invoking an emotional response and lasting impression. Then, analysis of a representative example will demonstrate how the poetic elements are transferred across languages, and the results of two surveys confirm their effects. The discussion is intended to shed light on the audience’s reception and perception of advertisements and provide translators with practical reference regarding poetic methods and the importance of the audience’s emotion and impression.
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The effects of mode on interpreting performance in a simulated police interview
Author(s): Sandra Hale, Jane Goodman-Delahunty, Natalie Martschuk and Stephen DohertyAvailable online: 23 February 2021More LessAbstractThis study tested the effects of the consecutive and simultaneous interpreting modes in a simulated police interview, addressing four research questions: (1) Does the consecutive interpreting mode lead to more accurate interpreting than the simultaneous interpreting mode? (2) Do language combinations moderate the performance of similarly qualified interpreters? (3) Does experience in simultaneous interpreting in legal settings increase interpreting accuracy in SI? and (4) Which mode of interpreting do interpreters perceive to require more mental effort? A total of 70 interpreters interpreted a live simulated interview between an English-speaking interviewer and an Arabic-, Mandarin- or Spanish-speaking suspect. Mode was varied within participants, and the order of the mode was counter-balanced across participants. Interpreters rated their perceived mental effort after the task. Independent assessments of performance showed better results for the simultaneous interpreting mode, regardless of language. This effect held for accuracy of style, verbal rapport markers, and interpreting protocol.
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Accessing Bodies that Matter
Author(s): Karolina Krasuska, Ludmiła Janion and Marta UsiekniewiczAvailable online: 17 February 2021More LessAbstractIn this self-reflexive paper, co-written by scholars currently collaborating on the Polish translation of Judith Butler’s Bodies that Matter, we discuss the political and activist stakes of translating a canonical queer theory text over 25 years after its original publication, in the context of anti-lgbtq+ public discourse in today’s Poland. We argue that the collective character of our translation process turns it into an activist workshop that negotiates social norms and works on the invention and application of their alternatives. This activist practice results in a programmatically accessible translation, written in gender-inclusive and queer-sensitive language that follows the poststructuralist philosophical underpinnings of the 1993 source text and its gendered language. Discussing examples of Butler’s use of grammatical gender and her politicized style in our translation, the article contributes to understanding the queer activist practice of translation and, specifically, underwritten questions of translating queer theory in a contemporary Polish (linguistic) context.
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Translating sexuality in the context of Anglo-American censorship
Author(s): Lintao QiAvailable online: 05 February 2021More LessAbstractThis article presents a descriptive study of the English translations of the classic Chinese novel Jin Ping Mei in the context of the Anglo-American literary censorship of obscenity in the twentieth century. By scrutinizing the strategies employed in the English translations of Jin Ping Mei, this article uncovers the dynamic interactions between literary translation activities and the evolving socio-historical contexts in the target culture. The resurrection of the archaic source text, particularly its erotic component, in the Anglophone world in the twentieth century was based on the (re)discovery of its value in the contemporary target context. In the case of Jin Ping Mei, equivalence at the linguistic and textual levels was simply not a concern of the translators and publishers, who had to decide how they would deal with the social reality of literary censorship, by submissively conforming to its demands, or by creatively confronting them.
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The body center stage
Author(s): Vanessa MontesiAvailable online: 22 December 2020More LessAbstractThis article examines Marie Chouinard’s choreography Jérôme Bosch: Le Jardin des délices (2016) as an intermedial translation of Bosch’s homonymous painting. Taking the concepts of distribution of the sensible and esthetic regime developed by Rancière (2004) as groundwork, I consider how dance and translation participate in the political by challenging traditional hierarchal author–translator relationships, by introducing new corporealities and discourses in the realm of the visible and by exploiting the slippage of meaning that can be produced in the reiteration of discourse and citationality that characterize these two disciplines. I conclude by arguing that in engaging with these three lines of thought, Jérôme Bosch: Le Jardin des délices offers a model of translation as an embodied and situated practice that combines the esthetic and the political by bringing a dialogue between equally participating subjects to bear upon a specific context.
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Political discourse analysis in operation
Author(s): Nancy Xiuzhi LiuAvailable online: 21 December 2020More LessAbstractAfter implementing of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) for four years, the Chinese government convened the BRI Summits in Beijing in 2017 and 2019, respectively. This article will address the questions of how the summits were covered in translated news by using empirical data from news published on the Reference News, a state-owned newspaper that publishes translated news, in comparison to news carried in People’s Daily, an authoritative national newspaper in China. Situated in the framework of political discourse analysis (PDA) within critical discourse analysis (CDA) and using the method of qualitative thematic analysis, the study shows that translated news is a platform where contentious ideologies are at play and where dominant ones leave little room for the confrontational. In this process, translators are submissive actors whose work is navigated by the agenda set by the authorities in either legitimizing or representing frames in mainstream media.
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“A cool kid”
Author(s): Hongwei BaoAvailable online: 18 December 2020More LessAbstractThis article traces the historical moment when queer theory first arrived in mainland China in the early 2000s by comparing and contrasting two translated texts in Chinese: Wang Fengzhen’s book Guaiyi Lilun [Peculiar Theory] and Li Yinhe’s book Ku’er Lilun [A Cool Kid Theory]. Juxtaposing the two translators’ positioning and marketing strategies, along with their use of paratexts such as book cover design and translator’s prefaces, this article aims to explain why Ku’er Lilun ended up being a more popular and widely circulated text than Guaiyi Lilun. It also pinpoints the cultural specificities of queer theory’s reception in the postsocialist Chinese context at the beginning of the new millennium. This article hopes to provide critical insights into the politics of translating academic theories transnationally, with a focus on paratextual, extratextual, and contextual factors which work in tandem to shape the reception of these theories in a non-Western context.
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Translating Qur’anic ‘X-phemisms’ Muslims live by
Author(s): Hamada HassaneinAvailable online: 30 November 2020More LessAbstractThis study employs a pragmasemantic approach to investigate the challenges Qur’an translators encounter when rendering Qur’anic euphemisms of licit intercourse (X-phemisms) into English. To achieve the objectives of the study, two understudied translations have been selected for a contrastive analysis of source language X-phemisms and their target language renderings. The analysis reveals that Qur’anic X-phemisms do not lend themselves to an easy translation due to cultural and linguistic idiosyncrasies; they hold a variety of lexical-semantic relations, and branch out into three broad ramifications: procreation, protection, and pleasure. Several Qur’anic X-phemisms have undergone semantic change through meaning-related processes, including generalization, particularization, amelioration, pejoration, and opposition. Some linguistic mechanisms have been manipulated to create euphemistic substitutes for direct references to marital sex through periphrasis, collocation, and figuration, all of which flout the Cooperative Principle in favor of the Politeness Principle.
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Translating code-switching in the colonial context
Author(s): Jinsil Choi, Kyung Hye Kim and Jonathan EvansAvailable online: 09 November 2020More LessAbstractPark Chan-wook, one of the most internationally acclaimed Korean filmmakers, uses language as an important aspect of characterization in The Handmaiden, his adaptation of Sarah Water’s novel Fingersmith. The historical background and the characters’ nationalities are changed, but code-switching between two languages – i.e., Korean and Japanese – recurs throughout the film, thereby enhancing its relevance for the Korean audience. Drawing on the notion of ‘proximity’ and reader response theory, this study examines the role of languages in Park’s characterization and proximation of the original work for the Korean audience, and the extent to which the shifts in proximity and the use of languages contribute to British audiences’ affective experiences when this Korean adaptation is subtitled in English.
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Constructing Russian identity in news translation
Author(s): Anneleen Spiessens and Piet Van PouckeAvailable online: 06 November 2020More LessAbstractIn the build-up to the annexation of Crimea in 2014, Russia’s state-owned media pushed a nationalist-imperialist narrative according to which Crimea is ethnically and historically Russian, and should, therefore, return to the Russian Motherland. This article underscores the critical role of news translation in the debate around the status of Crimea and in the circulation of global news, more generally. It focuses on the Russian website InoSMI, a portal that monitors and translates foreign press, during the peak of the Crimea crisis. Our analysis reveals that Russian translations reframe Western reports in such a way as to over-emphasize ties between Russia and Crimea. Drawing on both ethnonationalist and imperialist narratives that capitalize on the place Crimea holds in Russian imagination, and exploiting old metaphors of brotherhood, InoSMI promotes specific definitions of Russian space and identity that legitimize an aggressive foreign policy.
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Exploring deaf sign language interpreting students’ experiences from joint sign language interpreting programs for deaf and hearing students in Finland
Author(s): Ingeborg Skaten, Gro Hege Saltnes Urdal and Elisabet TiseliusAvailable online: 19 October 2020More LessAbstractIntegrated university programs for deaf and hearing sign language interpreting students are rare. In Finland, deaf interpreting students have been integrated in the only university program for sign language interpreting since its beginning in the early 2000s. This article investigates the experiences of the deaf interpreting students and deaf sign language interpreters (n = 5) who attend and have attended the program. We analyzed interview responses using critical discourse analysis and the concept of identity construction, and found that deaf interpreting students, despite some disadvantages, benefited from the integrated program. We also found three identity positions – competent deaf identity, student identity, and professional DI identity – and support for recognition ( Honneth 1996 ) in both the solidarity and legal sphere developed through the program.
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Additions in simultaneous signed interpreting
Author(s): Ella WehrmeyerAvailable online: 07 September 2020More LessAbstractUntil now, investigations of strategies used by signed language interpreters in the simultaneous mode have been sporadic and restricted to analyses of short transcripts. This article presents the first corpus-driven exploration of interpreter additions in news broadcasts simultaneously interpreted into South African Sign Language. Using grounded theory, it explores the types of additions made, the reasons for their production, and their downstream consequences. The results show that interpreters mainly add discourse markers, linguistic extrapolations such as filling in ellipsis and obvious co-text, repetitions, contextual information, and to a lesser extent, second translations, pragmatic markers, and new information. However, the cost is high as additions often result in concomitant omissions and occasional incoherence. From the results, a model is extrapolated to explain additions in terms of the interpreter’s perceived roles and status in the Deaf community.
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Measuring the usability of machine translation in the classroom context
Author(s): Yanxia Yang, Xiangling Wang and Qingqing YuanAvailable online: 25 August 2020More LessAbstractUsability is a key factor for increasing adoption of machine translation. This study aims to measure the usability of machine translation in the classroom context by comparing translation students’ machine translation post-editing output with their manual translation in two comparable translation tasks. Three dimensions of usability were empirically measured: efficiency, effectiveness, and satisfaction. The findings suggest that machine translation post-editing is more efficient than human translation and post-editing produces fewer errors than human translation. While the types of errors vary, errors in terms of accuracy outnumber those related to fluency. In addition, participants perceive the amount of time and work that is saved when post-editing to be greater benefit than the overall utility of post-editing. Likewise, students report a strong desire to learn post-editing skills in training programs.
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Interpreting is interpreting
Author(s): Jonathan DownieAvailable online: 06 July 2020More LessAbstractThis article argues that the use of interpreting settings as theoretical categories is no longer empirically sound. Instead, research should focus on the commonalities of all interpreting practice. This move is viewed as an enabling shift for the creation of Comparative Interpreting Studies, a strand dedicated to considering interpreting as a global practice. After discussing the rationale for the current use of interpreting settings as analytical categories, evidence from a variety of existing settings is used to illustrate the commonalities between all instances of interpreting and the fuzziness of the boundaries between these settings. It is argued that using interpreting settings leads to silo thinking, where researchers focus on research in the setting in which they are working, even when findings from other settings can be applied. The article ends with a discussion of the theoretical and practical potential of this move including the power of a comparative approach.
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The translator
Author(s): Gabriela SaldanhaAvailable online: 19 June 2020More LessAbstractThis article proposes that in order to understand the nature of literary translation as an art form, we need to complement existing approaches drawing on literary, linguistic and sociological theories with insights derived from performance studies. As a way of exploring what the theorization of translation as performance art could contribute to our understanding of literary translation, I map four basic tenets of performance as restored behavior ( Schechner 1985 ) to two translators’ (Margaret Jull Costa and Peter Bush) accounts of their practice. The mapping is illustrated with writings by and interviews with the translators, focusing on four points of contact: the unresolved dialectal tension between self and other, the deliberate, rehearsed nature of decisions, the need for distance between original and performance/translation, and the role of the audience.
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Radical cultural specificity in translation
Author(s): Anna StroweAvailable online: 22 April 2020More LessAbstractMost existing discussions of cultural specificity in translation presume that although translation may be difficult, the meaning of culturally-specific terms is at least known. This article considers the possibility of “radical cultural specificity,” in which the meaning of the item is inaccessible to the reader or translator and no native participant in the source culture is available to advise. Based on the concepts of culturally-specific items from the work of Javier Aixelá and radical translation from the work of W.V.O. Quine, I develop the notion of radical cultural specificity using examples from medieval Celtic literature, highlighting the role of knowledge and lack of knowledge in interpretation and translation. The concept is then briefly applied to science fiction or speculative fiction as well, suggesting that these concerns are not merely the province of scholars of historical literature.
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Methodological nationalism in translation studies
Author(s): Mattea CusselAvailable online: 11 March 2020More LessAbstractThis article critiques methodological nationalism and binaries in theoretical discussions of literary translation. The naturalization of the national story of translation is traced from the Renaissance up to its uncritical adoption when the discipline of translation studies was established. Borrowing from critiques of methodological nationalism in other disciplines, it is argued that a thorough revision of certain vocabularies is still needed to definitively break with lingering national and binary tropes. Venuti’s foreignization is challenged due to its most problematic but previously overlooked aspect: its reliance on national paradigms and circumscribed domestic and foreign groups. To eschew the image of literary translation as transfer from culture A to culture B, an alternative empirical approach to networks of intersectionally-positioned readers in transnational localities is proposed. This critique is necessary given the messiness of subjectivity and the need for new solidarities in our transforming transnational world.
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Translating discourse markers in theater
Author(s): Angela Tiziana Tarantini and Ruben BenattiAvailable online: 02 October 2019More LessAbstractThis article examines the translation of discourse markers in drama dialogue. Discourse markers are an important feature of spoken language, and unsurprisingly, they abound in drama dialogue. Yet very few studies have addressed the issue of discourse markers in theater translation. While some scholars suggest that discourse markers do not add anything to the propositional content of the sentence ( Bazzanella 1994 ), our study reveals that it is very difficult to omit them in translation. In this article we suggest that an approach based on pragmatics could inform the practice of translating discourse markers in a playtext without overriding the importance of the rhythm of a spoken utterance, which is vital for rendering a play in translation ( Bartlett 1996 ).
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Sign language interpreting services
Author(s): Maartje De Meulder and Hilde HaualandAvailable online: 06 September 2019More LessAbstractSign language version of the abstract
This article rethinks the impact of sign language interpreting services (SLIS) as a social institution. It starts from the observation that “access” for deaf people is tantamount to availability of sign language interpreters, and the often uncritically proposed and largely accepted solution at the institutional level to lack of access seems to be increasing the number of interpreters. Using documented examples from education and health care settings, we raise concerns that arise when SLIS become a prerequisite for public service provision. In doing so, we problematize SLIS as replacing or concealing the need for language-concordant education and public services. We argue that like any social institution, SLIS should be studied and analyzed critically. This includes more scrutiny about how different kinds of “accesses” can be implemented without SLIS, and more awareness of the contextual languaging choices deaf people make beyond the use of interpreters.
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Occupation or profession
Author(s): David Katan
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