Translation Spaces - Volume 5, Issue 2, 2016

This article conducts a corpus-based critical discourse analysis of keywords and their translations in Macao’s gaming discourse, with an aim to explore the impact of translation on the construction of gaming discourse and the development of the gaming industry in Macao from 1999 to 2011, the first decade following the region’s sovereignty handover. The corpus consists of texts from 2000 to 2011 concerning three public sectors in Macao: local government, academia and the media. The study finds diachronic as well as synchronic changes in the distribution and translation of certain keywords in the corpus. It argues that shifts in the keyword terminology being used, such as from ‘gambling’ to ‘gaming,’ aim at framing the Macao gaming industry in specific social developmental ways. It also argues that translation plays a crucial role in the construction of a new gaming discourse.

Translation has long been conceptualized in metaphors of space, whereas its temporal aspect is relatively underexplored. However, recently scholars have argued that translation does not only carry across but also carries forward, i.e., texts survive through time. The aim of this study is to examine how time and space are manipulated in translation, with a particular focus on how the two dimensions interact with each other. To achieve this aim, a memorial museum has been chosen for investigation. A museum, as a site to display dislocated objects from the past, constructs a unique temporal-spatial dramaturgy. This study argues that shifts of temporal-spatial frames in museum translations have a significant impact on how a nation’s past, present and future are perceived by target readers.

This paper sets out to explore the concept of hegemony in the field of conference interpreting practice. It presents the International Association of Conference Interpreters (AIIC) as the hegemon in conference interpreting and examines its power as a policy maker. The paper associates this type of investigation with the sociological turn in conference interpreting research. It takes two large-scale surveys by Feldweg (1996) and Zwischenberger (2013) as its starting point, based on the self-representations of conference interpreter members of AIIC. The examples taken from these two surveys reveal a consistent degree of consensus and highlight the hegemonic power exerted by AIIC. This study’s main focus is on appropriating the hegemony concept for conference interpreting and thereby showing that AIIC governs the entire field of conference interpreting practice. AIIC’s power as a policy maker is based on a large degree of consent, although its hegemonic power is not uncontested.

In September 2015, the ADAPT Centre for Digital Content Technology carried out a focus group study of 70 translators at the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Translation (DGT). The aim was to better understand the factors involved in the translators’ adoption and non-adoption of machine translation (MT) during their translation tasks. Our analysis showed that, while broadly positive attitudes to MT could be observed, MT was not consistently adopted for all tasks. We argue that ergonomic factors related to a human translator’s needs, abilities, limitations, and overall well-being heavily impacted on participants’ decisions to use MT or not in their tasks. We further claim that it is only by taking into account the special institutional circumstances in which the activity of DGT translation is situated that these ergonomic factors can be fully understood and explained.

This article provides a first concept of typographic identity in film and the impact of audiovisual translation on it. Based on an analysis of 52 films, relevant text elements and their graphical translation strategies in film were identified. Finally, possible shortcomings and challenges such as collisions and the impact on a film’s typographic identity and image composition are discussed as a first basis for further studies

As the Jesuit Figurists journeyed through the sea of commentaries on the Yijing and the trans-textual dialogue, they did not just play the role of translators and commentators by doing intralingual translation. They also sought the attention of the Kangxi Emperor and the elite literati by producing handwritten Chinese manuscripts that mimicked the format and grammatology of Chinese commentaries. Besides the commentarial tradition, and the Classical and vernacular language employed in the Chinese manuscripts of the Jesuit Figurists, their formats, writing/calligraphy, layout and other visual features had a life and history of their own. The manuscripts served as a visual medium that helped the Jesuit Figurists communicate and proselytize via a shared identity with the Chinese literati. They strove to imitate the format used in commentaries on the Yijing by earlier or contemporary literati. Thus, their Chinese manuscripts were a written space that showed the interaction among the forms of the books, their content, and their imagined readers. The Jesuit Figurists also faced mixed feelings and fluctuating support from their target audience in this translation space.

The scientific method known as empiricism has been attacked in two influential books in Translation Studies. Mona Baker’s Translation and Conflict sees all knowledge as being produced through narrative, thereby excluding the processes of repeated testing and dialogue that can be associated with an empirical approach. Further, Baker’s failure to attend to textual linearity, voice, and narrator position lends her project an ideological essentialism that actively shuns such empirical testing. Lawrence Venuti’s Translation Changes Everything, on the other hand, escapes essentialism by insisting on the active interpretation of all data. However, Venuti thereby falsely opposes hermeneutics to empirical method, in a way that willfully ignores the key twentieth-century epistemologies of science. The resulting anti-empiricism leads him to some very questionable psychoanalytical conclusions and an excessive reliance on the authorities of dictionaries and distanced theorists. Neither Baker nor Venuti can say, as must any empiricist, ‘I don’t know.’

This article describes assessment methods in undergraduate translation courses from English into the students’ native language at the University of Helsinki, Finland. We consider and attempt to develop assessment according to the principle of constructive alignment in the process of both teaching and learning of translators’ professional competences (as defined by Gambier et al. 2009 and Kelly 2005), which are discussed in relation to our course aims and intended outcomes. The primary methods of assessment described and analysed include students’ reflective translation commentaries, teacher feedback and end of course portfolios. We argue, based on both our teaching experience and student comments, that in spite of some obvious challenges, this assessment system is an effective way of measuring the students’ acquisition of translation competences, as well as acting as a scaffold in the process.