Translation Spaces - Volume 10, Issue 2, 2021

This article argues that researchers in Translation Studies may proactively aim to understand the consequences of an envisaged merger between targeted advertising and automated translation. Functional translation software is widely available online, and several platforms now perform instant translation, sometimes without asking the user whether this is required. Indeed, the user’s main language is known to various applications, which keep track of this information along with other settings and preferences. Data tracking is commonly used to produce targeted advertising: people receive commercial information about products they are likely to be interested in. If text can instantly be altered according to a user’s linguistic preferences, it can also be altered according to aesthetic, commercial, or political preferences. The article discusses theoretical and ideological aspects of the sociotechnical evolution towards the production and consumption of personalised content, highlighting the role translation may come to play.

The present article discusses the notion of translation hacking and attempts to chart the history of this practice in the Arabic context. It also discusses the current practices of translation hacking by examining the work of a well-organized online community of Arab translation hackers called Games in Arabic (GiA). To this end, the study adopts two methods for data collection. First, semi-structured interviews were conducted with the first translation hackers in the Arab world in order to document the history of this practice. Second, a cyberethnographic approach was adopted to collect qualitative data related to GiA, including their translation hacking practices and the technologies used to facilitate their collaborative work. Subsequently, this article attempts to reveal the roles played by the different GiA community members in executing their projects and how they control for quality in their work. Ultimately, the article attempts to provide insights into the practice of Arabic game localization performed by amateur translators, hackers, and gamers, in the hope of adding to current professional and pedagogical practices in Arabic game localization.

This article proposes the term Big Translation History (BTH) to describe a translation history that can be analysed computationally and that we define as involving: (1) large-scale research (geographical and chronological); (2) massive data understood as big data, accompanied by little data, and drawing on a wide range of often heterogeneous and non-structured sources; and (3) the use of computational techniques as part of the research process, and for the production of knowledge, rather than helping only with visualisation of data. We advance the hypothesis that one of the main possibilities of BTH, as a conceptual framework and a methodology, is to help decentralize translation history and literary and cultural history, in a broad sense. The article goes on to present an analysis of the circulation of literary translations and the agents involved in the Spanish-speaking world between 1898 and 1945 as a case study in BTH.

This article conducts a textual and reception analysis of George Jamieson’s translation of Qing marriage law with the aim of probing a translational encounter between traditional Chinese law and British anthropology. Approaching a Qing clause against marriage between persons of the same family name as an object of anthropological study, Jamieson annotated his rendition with rich paratexts to orient it under the concept of exogamy. After reflecting upon predecessors’ theories, he advanced his own by restructuring existing anthropological constructs. Taking his translation as a knowledge source, Jamieson further highlighted the existence of an endogamous limit upon the exogamy rule; this observation was absorbed by Henry Maine to strengthen his argument that exogamy and endogamy were not oppositional in agnatic societies. As revealed in Jamieson’s interaction with British anthropologists, he proved himself more than a translator of Qing marriage law but also a contributor to nineteenth-century British anthropology.

The present study propounds a methodology for the translation of Qur’anic lexis in a way that synergizes semantic preference, discourse prosody, and para/intertextuality. Towards the validation of this methodology, the Qur’anic lexical item آيـة (āyah) is investigated at two levels: (a) the intertextual level of the semantic preferences emerging in the various co-texts of āyah inside the Qurʼan and (b) the paratextual level of the overall discourse prosody underlying these semantic preferences in the exegetical contexts of āyah. The research finds firstly that there are four semantic preferences associated with āyah, viz. cosmological phenomena, miraculous tokens, conclusive evidence, and divine revelations/communications. Second, the discourse prosody underlying the Qurʼanic usages of āyah is divine visibility, which motivates the word’s generic English translation as “sign.” Third, in rendering the lexical item آيـة (āyah) into English, the well-known Qur’an translators in the Qurʼanic Arabic Corpus have opted either for “sign,” to maintain the positive discourse prosody associated with the Qur’anic usages of the item, or “token,” “portent,” “miracle(s),” or “verse/revelations/communications,” with a view to observing the semantic preferences associated with them.

Though interpreters’ professionalism has been discussed in interpreting studies, there have been few studies on how the general public see the image of interpreters. The present study is a multi-dimensional analysis of the image of conference interpreters as represented by the media, which is based on a corpus of 60 news reports about interpreting and interpreters in the Chinese media in the past 10 years. It explores the research question: How are conference interpreters represented in the Chinese media? Through thematic and rhetorical analysis of the headlines and body texts as well as multimodal analysis of the photos in the news reports, it is found that conference interpreters are represented by institutional conference and diplomatic interpreters, who are in turn represented as “stars” or public celebrities of the profession; they are frequently presented along with big events and big names, and portrayed as affiliating to power and as distant from the public. Images of female beauties among them are also selected and “consumed” as in popular culture. This implies a discrepancy between the self-perception of the interpreting profession and their representation by the media.

The article fills a gap in the existing array of translation metaphors by introducing maze-walkers as a metaphor for translators at work. Ten similarities and five dissimilarities between translating and walking through a hedge maze are discussed. Translators’ control over their actions is compared to that of maze-walkers and of four other metaphorical agents: stage and musical performers, puppeteers, echoborgs and ghost-writers. Most existing metaphors convey attitudes toward translations and translators, whereas the maze-walking metaphor captures the varied actions of a translating translator. The metaphor may be of value to anyone explaining translation to students.