Translation Spaces - Volume 6, Issue 2, 2017

The figure of the interpreter in conflict is as interesting as it is elusive to the rest of the profession and academia. One of the regions that has caught the attention and the interest of scholars is the Middle East. The literature tends to focus on one specific category – locally recruited interpreters – and the application of different theoretical concepts to their role and consideration by the parties involved, and does not delve too deeply into the intricacies of the specific role of other categories of interpreter in this context. Also, the existing narratives do not always frame this role through the typology of the conflict in which it is developed. This paper identifies narratives included in the literature that represent interpreters working in armed conflicts in the Middle East in order to examine the different existing categories. The paper then draws on the results of a qualitative study carried out with staff interpreters at an international organisation with the aim of completing this categorisation. Our focus will be on the characteristics of the different categories of interpreter in terms of their involvement in the different stages of the conflict, their positionality, working conditions, status and recognition by the parties involved in the conflict.

In the current climate where the legitimacy of Western-based international Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs) is increasingly put under pressure, some NGOs have started to change their approach to translation, often as a consequence of structural changes within the organisation. This article focuses on the translation challenges of one such organisation, namely Amnesty International, and how it has aimed to deal with these. Drawing on ethnographic data, it describes the mission of Amnesty’s Language Resource Centre, which aims to support translation at Amnesty into a variety of languages. The article reveals some of the tensions between the use of professional translators, particularly for languages such as French, Spanish and Arabic, and the continued reliance of smaller Amnesty offices on volunteer translators. It demonstrates that despite the trend towards professionalisation, volunteer translation continues to represent a significant portion of Amnesty’s translation work.

Intercultural translation is a salient feature of communicative interactions in multilingual institutional spaces. This article draws on a concept of intercultural translation that functions as a linguistically radical strategy through which other ways of knowing and being are introduced, with particular emphasis on institutions, multilingualism, and less-translated languages. It describes the modes in which indigenous actors used intercultural translation to modify Mexico’s institutional tutoring program in higher education. It focuses on the selective appropriation of words and meanings, the standardization of concepts, and the configuring of an intercultural frame of reference, whereby members of an intercultural Mexican university introduced the Yucatec Maya word iknal as a hybrid educational system. In sum, the article posits intercultural translation as a critical communicative practice ubiquitous to the dynamics of language in socio-cultural spaces.

This article deals with the naming of ecology-related objects in Arabic, as illustrated in the naming of the snowstorms “Storm Huda”, “Storm Jana” and “Storm Zina” which whipped through the Middle East countries on January 6 and February 19, 2015 respectively. The article analyses a corpus of headlines taken from four online newspapers and one news agency, examines the strong connotative values of the snowstorm names, and discusses their relations to translation. The findings of the study show a consensus amongst journalists and meteorologists in Palestine, Jordan, Syria and Saudi Arabia to avoid Arabicisation and opt instead for a full adaptation of foreign storm names in line with the poetics of the receiving culture, one seemingly infused with several echoes from Arab-Islamic culture and particularly the Qur’an. The meticulous care in their choice of words is fully compatible with the perceived target language (TL) audience belonging to Arab-Islamic culture, one with little affinity to English culture.

Over the past three decades, the Chinese government has repeatedly called for the effective transmission of its policies to the West through translation. Yet the effectiveness of translation and its evaluation has remained a ticklish issue, particularly for texts with a political agenda. Fidelity to literal denotative meaning at the grain of words and phrases is generally insufficient for the translation of such texts. Texts in these sensitive domains of the Chinese context call for exacting fidelity in tone, register, genre, stance, connotation, and, overall, rhetoric. The Chinese government, wishing to avoid misinterpretation, is concerned with sharing their policies with foreigners as closely as possible to the way the many authors of these policies understood them from the inside. In this paper, we think of a “rhetoric” of translation holistically as capturing the “inside contours” of words and phrases as understood by a native speaker. For this purpose, we present a rhetorical approach to translation that can help explain the translation standards of Chinese government documents marked for wide-scale distribution abroad. The approach and method can be applicable in the assessment of other translations when rhetoric or the overall effect is the major concern.

The last few years have witnessed a surge in the interest of a new machine translation paradigm: neural machine translation (NMT). Neural machine translation is starting to displace its corpus-based predecessor, statistical machine translation (SMT). In this paper, I introduce NMT, and explain in detail, without the mathematical complexity, how neural machine translation systems work, how they are trained, and their main differences with SMT systems. The paper will try to decipher NMT jargon such as “distributed representations”, “deep learning”, “word embeddings”, “vectors”, “layers”, “weights”, “encoder”, “decoder”, and “attention”, and build upon these concepts, so that individual translators and professionals working for the translation industry as well as students and academics in translation studies can make sense of this new technology and know what to expect from it. Aspects such as how NMT output differs from SMT, and the hardware and software requirements of NMT, both at training time and at run time, on the translation industry, will be discussed.

In spite of its highly multilingual nature, it is generally accepted that most Wikipedia content is the product of original writing rather than being translated from another language version of the encyclopaedia. Wikipedia represents what is almost a complete, self-contained but vast research ecosystem; however, an unusual initial challenge for the researcher is to identify the primary data for a specific research project. The main aim of this paper is to make a number of proposals towards a possible methodology for discovering where the main foci of this new type of collaborative translation are located. Significant methods for this include the use of the encyclopaedia’s list-based structure and of different features of page anatomy. The article also aims to outline specific topics for research and, during the discussion, offers some initial findings of its own, using Russian and Chinese to English translation as its main sources of examples.

Professional translation is now predominantly carried out in virtual-team-style production networks where communication between language service providers (LSPs) and freelance translators’ practice is increasingly restricted to computerised methods. Although some literature deals with interactions between different participants in the translation production network, little attention has been paid to the ways in which they exchange feedback on translation products. Using observation and interview methods, this article examines how feedback is perceived and dealt with by freelance translators and LSPs’ project managers. Our results suggest that, although both groups share the value of feedback to some extent, feedback does not always reach translators and the translators are not always aware of the rationale behind it. By drawing on the Job Characteristics Model (JCM) ( Hackman and Oldham 1980 ), which was developed in organisational psychology, we argue that incorporating feedback in the job constructs of freelance translators’ work may help to enhance translators’ motivation.