Translation Spaces - Volume 8, Issue 2, 2019

Why do we need a history of audiovisual translation? The elements of such a history cannot be tackled without any context, especially outside of a history of cinema, understood both as an art made of techniques and a business. And what kind of history do we need? We try here to define the conditions and resources for a connected and comparative history and deal with a few methodological challenges.

In an attempt to appreciate the contribution that social network analysis (SNA) might offer to translation historiography, two main approaches are presented and discussed in this study: explanatory SNA and exploratory SNA. The former is more concerned with SNA measures while the latter deals with three potential narratives of social networks. The aim is to employ SNA in diachronic and synchronic dimensions of literary translation publishing historiography in Iran from 1991 to 2010, a micro-macro framework that seamlessly integrates agents’ relationships, visualization and network analysis techniques to explore the impact of ideological-political shifts on the quantity as well as quality of major agents’ relations. Furthermore, the study attempts to explore how the synergy between Giddens’ Structuration Theory (GST) and SNA can support a deeper and more empirically grounded understanding of translation historiography. The goal of the study is both methodological and scientific. The results of SNA graphical outputs suggest that there is a significant relationship between the structure of relationships in fiction publishing field and the dominant political discourse in Iran.

Up until now, the literature on sociological approaches to translation has mainly focused on the self-perceptions of translators. This article analyses the coverage devoted to non-literary translation and translators in the print media in Switzerland. What perceptions of translation are newspapers circulating? Are these hetero-images positively or negatively connoted? A qualitative thematic analysis is conducted on four daily newspapers in Switzerland – Tages-Anzeiger, St. Galler Tagblatt, Le Temps and 24 Heures (two important newspapers for each of the two major official languages) – over a period of one year (spring 2013 – spring 2014). The analysis shows the scarcity and negativism of discourse about non-literary translation in Switzerland: it is depicted as a risky, costly, lonely and peripheral business – results that would need to be compared across media and countries. Understanding the construction of external ‘translation talk’ may help social actors such as translators or professional societies fight against existing prejudices about translation.

This article analyzes the election slogans of Hong Kong chief executives and the titles of their policy addresses since Hong Kong’s handover to mainland China in 1997, from the point of view of translation methods, cultural implications and reader responses. It finds that literal translation dominates in the translation of election slogans and policy address titles, that translated slogans and titles portray Hong Kong as a collectivist society with low power distance, and that choices between domestication and foreignization are dependent upon individual chief executives (or nominees). The article discusses the growing importance of the role of readers and proposes an inductive framework of interactive responses to represent the reality of political translation in the new era brought about by digitalization.

The application of machine translation (MT) in crisis settings is of increasing interest to humanitarian practitioners. We collaborated with industry and non-profit partners: (1) to develop and test the utility of an MT system trained specifically on crisis-related content in an under-resourced language combination (French-to-Swahili); and (2) to evaluate the extent to which speakers of both French and Swahili without post-editing experience could be mobilized to post-edit the output of this system effectively. Our small study carried out in Kenya found that our system performed well, provided useful output, and was positively evaluated by inexperienced post-editors. We use the study to discuss the feasibility of MT use in crisis settings for low-resource language combinations and make recommendations on data selection and domain consideration for future crisis-related MT development.