Translation and Interpreting Studies. The Journal of the American Translation and Interpreting Studies Association - Online First

Advertisements 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.

This 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.

Park 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.

Integrated 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.

This 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.