Translation Spaces - Online First

Empirical research on the cognitive processing of audiovisual translation (AVT) products has been thriving over the past decade. While the use of cutting-edge experimental tools such as eye trackers has drawn increasing scholarly attention and accelerated the progress in understanding the complex mental processes involved in the reception of multimodal AVT products, relatively less attention has been devoted to the importance of establishing a theoretical framework or cognitive model that can explain and predict the behaviours observed in empirical experiments. By reviewing numerous theories or cognitive models relevant to AVT research in explaining how different perceptual and cognitive systems operate for understanding multimodal products, this paper calls for engagement with these theoretical frameworks and models to work towards a robust model that can generate testable hypotheses for the integration and interaction of multiple sources of information involved in the processing of AVT or other multimodal products.

Empirical research on cognitive processing in AVT has been on the rise in recent years. A number of overarching works have recommended more standardised approaches and methodological frameworks to contribute to more streamlined, replicable, reproducible and valid future AVT research. To date, the issue of comparability of research materials (e.g., clips, subtitle tracks, comprehension questionnaires) and, more specifically, how to achieve comparability in quasi-experimental and experimental studies, particularly those involving repeated measures, has received little attention. This paper aims to address this knowledge gap by proposing a common-sense ten-step preparatory process for quasi-experimental and experimental subtitling studies. This preparatory process has previously been used in the S4AE project. The paper will focus on the final four steps, consisting of the preparation and comparison of multiple subtitle tracks. These steps were conceptualized taking into account the present research on subtitle parameters and the obstacles encountered while preparing comparable subtitle tracks.

Recent developments in neural machine translation, and especially speech translation, are gradually but firmly entering the field of audiovisual translation (AVT). Automation in subtitling is extending from a machine translation (MT) component to fully automatic subtitling, which comprises MT, auto-spotting and automatic segmentation. The rise of this new paradigm renders MT-oriented experimental designs inadequate for the evaluation and investigation of automatic subtitling, since they fail to encompass the multimodal nature and technical requirements of subtitling. This paper highlights the methodological gaps to be addressed by multidisciplinary efforts in order to overcome these inadequacies and obtain metrics and methods that lead to rigorous experimental research in automatic subtitling. It presents a review of previous experimental designs in MT for subtitling, identifies their limitations for conducting research under the new paradigm and proposes a set of recommendations towards achieving replicability and reproducibility in experimental research at the crossroads between AVT and MT.

Space as an epistemological category has a long history within the humanities in general and has attracted increasing attention more recently in translation studies. It has come to be understood predominantly as a discursive category (e.g., cultural spaces in a figurative sense) and the product of social interactions (cf. the relationship between agents). This contribution focuses for the first time on the physical movement within an eminent translatorial project at the beginning of the 19th century in Russia. Where do these translators come from, where do they move to and where do they leave after finishing the translation? In addressing those questions, this case study brings to the fore the relevant spatial relations of translators, translations and other agents engaged in a translation. Several thematic maps are produced, which are helpful for visualizing these movements in space and for situating a translation space in the context of its physical surroundings.

This article presents the results of a study involving the translation of a short story by Kurt Vonnegut from English to Catalan and Dutch using three modalities: machine-translation (MT), post-editing (PE) and translation without aid (HT). Our aim is to explore creativity, understood to involve novelty and acceptability, from a quantitative perspective. The results show that HT has the highest creativity score, followed by PE, and lastly, MT, and this is unanimous from all reviewers. A neural MT system trained on literary data does not currently have the necessary capabilities for a creative translation; it renders literal solutions to translation problems. More importantly, using MT to post-edit raw output constrains the creativity of translators, resulting in a poorer translation often not fit for publication, according to experts.

Wikipedia is a multilingual, user-driven online encyclopaedia available in 325 languages and language varieties. Such linguistic diversity has drawn the attention of translation scholars over the past decade. Previous research has addressed, among other issues, the quality of translated Wikipedia entries, the motivations driving editors-translators, and the taxing negotiations behind editorial changes. Nevertheless, the processes underpinning translation practices in the encyclopaedia have often been overlooked. Consequently, this paper adopts a praxeological approach to translation by analysing documented standards across four Wikipedia language communities and the extent to which 16 experienced translators have assimilated them. The findings suggest that Wikipedia guidelines on translation have slight but tangible differences across the communities under investigation. Moreover, the interview data showed a tendency among participants to attach more importance to cross-wiki editing policies than to any local translation guidelines. This preference ultimately reinforces previous claims that translation and editing in Wikipedia form a continuum.