Translation Spaces - Volume 12, Issue 2, 2023

In August 2022, the New York Times published an article entitled Why is this colorful little wheel suddenly everywhere in Japan? (Dooley and Ueno 2022). The little wheel refers to the logo of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), a United Nations (UN) initiative at the core of Agenda 2030, an extensive “plan of action for people, planet and prosperity” (UN General Assembly 2015). As illustrated by the Japanese example, the SDGs enjoy increasing public visibility across the globe and are frequently appealed to in education, politics and corporate communication. Despite the importance attached to the goals in both national and international settings, the SDG framework has received little attention in translation studies. This special collection aims to address this gap. The introduction presents the SDGs and highlights the role played in their dissemination by indirect translation, understood as translation of translation. The four articles included in the collection are introduced and further reflections are provided on the position of language as a resource at the interface of economic, social, and environmental sustainability.

Despite its controversial status, indirect translation remains one of the most prevalent translation methods and efforts have been made to explore the positive effects of this practice. The present article aims to contribute to such endeavours by researching the potential of indirect fansubbing for the promotion of several key areas of the United Nations’ Fourth Sustainable Development Goal (SDG). The article reports on a fansubbing community consisting of Chinese to Spanish amateur subtitlers who have mobilised indirect translation to attain linguistic proficiency, translational skills and cultural literacy. Results from fieldwork and qualitative data show that indirect subtitles might enhance Spanish-speaking communities’ appreciation of foreign languages and cultures by providing access to otherwise inaccessible audiovisual products. The present research finds potential for indirect fansubbing as an autodidactic method capable of promoting a culture of lifelong learning, global citizenship, and the appreciation of cultural diversity, factors conducive to the fourth SDG.

This article addresses the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goal 8 (Decent Work and Economic Growth) through the lens of pivot template subtitling, a practice deemed logistically efficient by some and ethically suspicious by others. Drawing on (i) a critical review of 29 European codes of ethics promoted by professional translation associations and (ii) the answers to our online questionnaire on pivot subtitling (completed by 376 subtitlers based in Europe), we analyse the main concerns raised about pivot subtitling from the standpoint of access to decent work and economic growth in the AVT industry. Findings suggest that, from the professional subtitlers’ point of view, current practices in pivot template-centred workflows may slow down the progress on SDG8, worsen working conditions and clash with professional codes of ethics. We end by suggesting ways to improve the use of indirect translation, so it does not hinder progress on SDG8 in the AVT industry.

This article conducts a meta-analysis of existing research to theorize how machine translation (MT) may help resolve underlying contradictions in the development sector that preclude the UN’s 10th Sustainable Development Goal: to reduce inequality within and among countries. Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) frequently work in dominant languages and neglect marginalized languages, reinforcing power imbalances between the Global North and Global South in development planning. MT between marginalized languages may improve collaboration between local communities to redress shared disadvantages. As an example, the article hypothesizes a sustainable, “low-tech” MT system pivoting through Spanish to translate between three Mayan languages in Guatemala: K’iche’, Q’eqchi’, and Mam. First, the article theorizes three key dimensions comprising the overall sustainability of low-resource MT in development: quality, social, and environmental. It then evaluates the sustainability of various MT architectures. Finally, it reaffirms the ability for indirect translation (classic pivot-based MT) to facilitate MT between low-resource languages.

Term variation occurs when different designations are used to name the same concept. In institutional settings, such as the European Union, term variants multiply, partly as a result of the different languages and directions involved. Indirect translation is a recurrent practice in these multilingual contexts since it limits the number of language combinations, besides reducing costs and the need for translators. This paper describes how indirect translation via English has an influence on Spanish term variation in the European Union. We analyzed the EUR-Lex and Europarl English and Spanish corpora in Sketch Engine. The focus was on concepts related to Sustainable Development Goal 13: Climate Action, which are specifically addressed in these institutional corpora as a result of a long-standing environmental awareness. Our analysis indicates that indirect translation seems to have a subtle effect on term variants, since their proliferation seems to be mitigated when indirect translation is used.

Although research on the role of emotion in audiovisual translation and audio description has gained some ground in recent years, the emotional reception of subtitles as an AVT mode has been under researched. To address this empirical gap, this paper presents the results of a study on the emotional rating of English and Polish subtitles to a selection of animated films. Expressions from Polish and English subtitled versions of the same films were collected, and 100 participants (native speakers of Polish and English) were asked to rate them in terms of emotional valence and arousal evoked. While the main effect of utterance type (negatively valenced, neutral, positively valenced) was observed, there was no effect of language, suggesting that the subtitle excerpts elicited similar responses in both languages.

This article investigates the role of localization in the representation of different gender and sexuality profiles in video games. Using Sara Ahmed’s queer phenomenology as a methodological framework, it analyzes the ideological and cultural limitations that restrict the rewriting of minority sexualities and genders when the original versions are transferred to other languages. The article begins by considering the generative capacities of translation as an agent that can discursively construct the subject, before focusing on the implications of localization for the shaping of identities from a phenomenological perspective to describe what conditions may lead to the appearance of translated queer paradigms in video games. The theoretical approach is applied to selected examples and conclusions for the practice of localization and its academic study are drawn.

Dubbed speech has often been accused of sounding artificial and somewhat exaggerated, mainly because it features a type of melody that substantially differs from both spontaneous speech and domestic fictional dialogue. This paper explores the most significant vocal patterns that shape a recognisable melody in Castilian-Spanish dubbed dialogue in order to ascertain whether they really contribute to the artificiality of the target version or, on the contrary, help preserve the credibility of the film production and viewers’ cinematic illusion. The discussion reveals that dubbed speech is characterised by certain vocal features specific to this genre that, despite differing from the ones used in spontaneous speech and screen acting, appear to work effectively in dubbing and are generally tolerated by audiences. There seems to be room, however, for naturalising some of these patterns in an effort to achieve an acceptable balance between what conveys the impression of spontaneity and what sounds natural within the context of dubbing.