Translation Spaces - Volume 2, Issue 1, 2013

Whether dealing with social work, humanitarian assistance, solidarity or cooperation, the multilingual linguistic resources necessary for supporting social mediators within the domain of humanitarian work are significantly lacking. Institutional infrastructures which could be capable of fulfilling these needs end up being excessively rigid and sluggish in responding to the complex linguistic situations in which people in vulnerable circumstances find themselves immersed. As such, in times of need and of assistance following a natural disaster, or as a consequence of armed conflict or due to reasons of social injustice, the traditional, linear and hierarchical processes of terminology production prove inadequate when the tools critical for dealing with urgent situations must be provided.Unlike the methods typically used in industrial societies, the “network society” proposes new models of collaborative work patterned on virtual communities. This article takes as its premise that the hacker spirit, a key aspect of the “network society” (Castells 2011), is an exceptional point of reference around which new processes for terminology work can be developed. The goal of the article is to explore this terrain and show how these ideas have actually been implemented in practice through the creation of the collaborative platform Humanterm.

The project manager (PM) has become an inevitable and indispensible component of translation workflow due to the rapid industrialization of the translation industry over the last two decades. A PM serves as the mediator between the translator(s), the language service provider (LSP), and the end client. The human resources of language industry projects are increasingly organized into geographically distributed and culturally heterogeneous “virtual teams”. The virtual character of these teams has created new challenges for group dynamics. This paper attempts to define the fluid role of the modern project manager by focusing on translators’ attitudes toward the PM in virtual teamwork situations, as revealed by an online survey. The survey looked at the factors of (a) communication workflow; (b) matching the skills of team members to projects; (c) interpersonal relationships; (d) translator appreciation, and (e) the PM’s level of team support and supervision. Survey results were analyzed via a regression model as a means of exploring the important elements of a PM’s role in virtual translation teams from the perspective of the team members themselves.

The tension between unity versus multiplicity seems to be at the heart of the European Union (EU) and of translation studies (TS). Indeed, a significant parallel between the two is the use of English as a lingua franca (ELF). The EU appears to be torn between a notion of language as a crucial element of one’s identity on the one hand, and a predominantly instrumental, Lockean view of language, on the other. A similar dynamic appears to take place in TS, an area that is par excellence heterogeneous and in which the notion of difference plays a paramount role. Indeed, at times TS appears to be afflicted by a sense of self-consciousness regarding its lack of unity and homogeneity. According to some, the solution is to foster the standardisation of its methods and terminology. But would proposing standardised terminology in a standardised language for the area not inevitably entail repressing different approaches in different languages? The paper explores this question in the context of the use of English as a lingua franca, and proposes various ways out of the dilemma both for the EU and TS.

We describe translation effects that have been studied in the automated text classification literature. We expand on a point within this research space, quality effects, with our own work in this area. We present an efficient method for evaluating text quality on the basis of reference texts. The method, which is general to text classification problems more widely construed, is related to the background literature and argued to be effective on the strength of the fact that it enables quality checking of amounts of text that exceed what is humanly feasible to verify. The method partially automates the process: in processing the entirety of a translated corpus being probed, it ranks items for stylistic conformity with a reference corpus, and the least conforming ranks are indicated as the items most likely to require human intervention.

Audiovisual translation is an academic term that covers both well-established and new ground-breaking linguistic and semiotic transfers like dubbing, subtitling, surtitling, respeaking, audiosubtitling, voice-over, simultaneous interpreting at film festivals, free-commentary and goblin translation, subtitling for the deaf and the hard of hearing, audiodescription, fansubbing and fandubbing. This article presents a classification of audiovisual translation modes or types, and discusses some interesting developments in the audiovisual translation market at the beginning of this new century. Dubbing countries are moving towards subtitling, subtitling countries are beginning to dub, voice-over countries are shifting towards dubbing and subtitling, while voice-over is moving into dubbing and subtitling countries and gaining ground with younger audiences.

In recent years, machine translation (MT) has begun to take its place alongside translation memory, terminology management and workflow automation as a key tool in large-scale professional translation projects. Nevertheless, misconceptions abound about the ways in which MT affects the professional translation work process. Effective, efficient and appropriate use of MT in professional translation production is a complex affair that requires an awareness and understanding of the factors that shape the success of MT deployments in terms of both systems development and return on investment (ROI). Generally speaking, however, these factors are not well understood by translation buyers, translation agencies or professional translators. This article provides an overview of the factors that shape successful commercial MT use and addresses some common misperceptions surrounding MT in professional translation projects.

As an interdisciplinary research endeavor into the foundations of human and artificial intelligence, cognitive science has substantial contributions to offer to the field of translation studies. Like any other explanatory approach to socially embedded and organized behavior, cognitive science deals with hard-to-resolve dichotomies such as static versus dynamic approaches, lab- or field-based methods or the opposing views of individual and social explanations. To introduce current theoretical developments from cognitive science, we offer a conceptual framework that conceives these apparent dichotomies as complementary perspectives and helps us to cope with the nested and embedded nature of translatorial cognition and action. For this purpose, we specify a dynamic network analytical model which treats acts of individual cognition and (inter)action as being constitutively interwoven with their social, symbolic and material environments and combine all its elements into a coherent dynamic process perspective. In our outlook, we discuss this extended model’s potential to structure the ongoing theoretical debate on translation process research, as well as its ability to serve as a scaffold for defining and contextualizing empirical studies and thus guiding research into the complex dynamics of translation as a situated activity.