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- Volume 6, Issue 2, 2019
The Journal of Internationalization and Localization - Volume 6, Issue 2, 2019
Volume 6, Issue 2, 2019
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Translation in the COVID-19 health emergency in Wuhan
Author(s): Peng Wangpp.: 86–107 (22)More LessAbstractIntercultural crisis communication in an interconnected and globalized world emphasizes the need for translation to be put in place as foreign nationals with cultural and linguistic barriers might rely on it to prepare for a possible crisis or make informed decisions when already affected by a crisis. However, translation is an underdeveloped tool in crisis management, particularly in China. Considering it a special branch of public service translation, the author investigates crisis translation by using a case study of the disruptive outbreak of novel coronavirus disease in Wuhan. Based upon the author’s first-hand experience as a crisis manager at the Office of Foreigner Affairs in the Municipal Government of Wuhan, this article describes how government translators with the help of external volunteer translators made language services available and accessible to affected foreign nationals in the response phase from 8 January 2020 to 7 April 2020. It analyses these translation-mediated activities from a crisis manager’s perspective. Despite the preliminary nature of the findings, which still call for further validation, it is hoped that insights from this article will be of interest to those who are engaged with crisis translation services and to those who research crisis translation.
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Website localization
Author(s): Georgios Floros and Parthena Charalampidoupp.: 108–130 (23)More LessAbstractTraditionally, website translation has been considered a process moving from the global to the local, or from the major to the minor, and has largely been termed localization. Yet, the various meanings and interpretations of the term create the need for more specific terms that designate specific types of localization such as the cases where a locally generated website, created in a locale with ‘minor’ presence on the international market, needs to be provided in a language that is considered ‘major’ in cyberspace, e.g. websites into English as a lingua franca. In such cases, the website content transfer follows an opposite direction, i.e. from the local to the global. We would like to capitalize on the major-minor metaphor as a methodological tool for cases emerging as a quasi-opposite process to the prevailing conceptualization of localization, in an attempt to highlight differences which might justify new terminology. It will be argued that the concept of locale from which the term localization stems does not apply when a culturally undefined audience is addressed, and a new term will be proposed.
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Cultural localisation as a strategy to preserve the persuasive function in the translation of tourism websites from French into English
Author(s): Sally Elizabeth Cowanpp.: 131–152 (22)More LessAbstractTourist promotional texts function like advertising texts in that they aim to “persuade, lure, woo, and seduce” (Dann 1996). In the context of global marketing, tourists can be considered consumers who seek to escape from ordinary life carrying their culturally embedded mindsets with them. Although cultural differences have been widely discussed in the literature on tourism translation, few studies have focused on the deeper level ‘out-of-awareness’ culture through which tourists travelling abroad interpret what they see. This paper investigates cultural localisation as a strategy to adapt the source text of a French wine tourism website to the hidden cultural values of British tourists in order to preserve the persuasive function of the target text. Using Hall’s anthropological iceberg model and Hofstede’s cultural dimensions as the framework, a small sample of French source texts and their English translations are compared to demonstrate the link between the stylistic features of tourism language and the psychological motivations of tourists, highlighting the interplay between all levels of the cultural iceberg. The findings suggest that culturally localised tourism websites are more likely to succeed as instruments of persuasion, with ego-targeting discussed as an effective strategy when adapting the text to appeal to the British market.
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Maylath, Bruce and St.Amant, Kirk (2019) (eds.) Translation and Localization – A guide for technical and professional communicators
Author(s): Marian Flanaganpp.: 164–174 (11)More LessThis article reviews Translation and Localization – A guide for technical and professional communicators
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