Translation Spaces - Volume 9, Issue 2, 2020

Abstract

This article explores translation in the lives of asylum seekers from various African countries living in state-provided accommodation in the region of Umbria, Italy. While (semi) professional translators and interpreters play a crucial part in interactions between institutions and asylum seekers, translation invests the totality of the asylum experience. Translation is a vital skill for asylum seekers, and their interactions with the landscape of Italian villages involve the transfer of meaning across different languages and semiotic systems (such as body language, social norms, and cultural practices). Building on recent semiotic and spatial approaches to translation, this article examines the experience of translation that emerged from conversations with asylum seekers, providing an overview of a complex ecosystem of translation and shedding light on the everyday reality of refugee integration.

Abstract

How legitimacy narratives in conflict zones are constructed and mediated through translation remains largely under-researched. This article investigates the strategies that the United Nations Special Envoy for Yemen, Martin Griffiths, uses to construct narratives of legitimacy for the Houthi movement in his Security Council briefings on the conflict in Yemen and their Arabic translations. Using a combination of a narrative framework, which highlights the notion of agency, and a semiotic model of triadic signification, which highlights motivatedness in signification, this article identifies metonymization as a strategy in constructing such narratives of legitimacy, with three additional sub-strategies of labeling, naming, and selective appropriation. While the Arabic translations are generally faithful to their originals in terms of the strategies used, some demonstrate a remarkable departure from United Nations translation norms. These findings shed light on theoretical issues of translator agency under such norms, and the pedagogical implications of such agency are addressed.

Abstract

Before the COVID-19 pandemic, there was no real need to integrate outdoor education into translation studies, as it was easy to balance indoor and outdoor time before and after translation classes. However, the lockdown has deeply affected not only learning but also the mental and physical health of teachers and students, and outdoor education may contribute to recovery afterwards. The proposals in this paper focus on the benefits that being outdoors has for physical health, knowledge, social relations, mental health and attitude to learning. Moreover, being outdoors allows for social distancing. The activities presented in this paper are related to specialized translation, sight translation, simultaneous interpreting, consecutive interpreting, role-play interpreting, translation theory, song translation, theatre translation, machine translation post-editing, translators’ employability, translation project management and, last but not least, intermodal transcreation.

Abstract

This article presents the results of a study involving the translation of a fictional story from English into Catalan in three modalities: machine-translated (MT), post-edited (MTPE) and translated without aid (HT). Each translation was analysed to evaluate its creativity. Subsequently, a cohort of 88 Catalan participants read the story in a randomly assigned modality and completed a survey. The results show that HT presented a higher creativity score if compared to MTPE and MT. HT also ranked higher in narrative engagement, and translation reception, while MTPE ranked marginally higher in enjoyment. HT and MTPE show no statistically significant differences in any category, whereas MT does in all variables tested. We conclude that creativity is highest when professional translators intervene in the process, especially when working without any aid. We hypothesize that creativity in translation could be the factor that enhances reading engagement and the reception of translated literary texts.

Abstract

The more language service companies (LSCs) include machine translation post-editing (MTPE) in their workflows, the more important it is to know how the PE task is performed, who the post-editors are, and what skills they should have. This research is designed to address such questions. It aims to deepen our knowledge of current practices to later create new training content and adapt existing training methodologies to different types of audiences. Based on the results of a survey of LSCs and other companies who currently use MTPE, we present a picture of evolving practices in the contemporary European MTPE market, and opinions held about this emerging métier. Our research finds that a high level of expertise in MTPE may not necessarily be indicative of the industry, and that the post-editor of MT has a multi- and transdisciplinary profile.

Abstract

For over two decades, Translation Studies (TS) scholars have argued that the discipline is going through a ‘technological turn’. This paper critically questions whether TS has already completed this “paradigmatic” or “disciplinary turn,” “a clearly visible and striking” change of direction that can “perhaps even [amount] to a redefinition of the subject concerned” (Snell-Hornby 2010, 366). After a revision of the notion of ‘turn’ in TS, it will be argued that the ‘technological’ one has been completed and it can, in fact, be assessed “after it is already complete” (ibid). It will be shown how the emergence and consolidation of this turn were “driven not by theoretical developments in cognate areas of inquiry,” but are an “emergent property from new forms of translation practice” (Cronin 2010, 1). As a consequence, it has permeated TS across its different subdisciplines, both in their theoretical apparatus and/or in their research methodologies. In this examination, the picture that emerges is that translation, across TS, has in fact been redefined in one way or another as an instance of “human-computer interaction,” even in contexts such as literary translation.

This article reviews Machine Translation and Global Research: Towards Improved Machine Translation Literacy in the Scholarly Community