Translation and Translanguaging in Multilingual Contexts - Volume 11, Issue 3, 2025

This study examines the language employed on the social media platform Facebook for promoting domestic tourist destinations, focusing on the Facebook pages managed by the tourism authorities of Italy, Britain, and the United States. The analysis delves into how content is structured within posts, the interactional linguistic features used to engage readers, and the overall communicative approach of the posts. To accomplish this, three corpora of Facebook posts were compiled, covering the period from August 2022 to August 2023. These corpora were analysed following Hyland’s (2005) theoretical model of metadiscourse and using analytical methods commonly employed in corpus linguistics. A manual qualitative analysis was conducted to discern how content is organised in the posts across the three Facebook pages. The English translations available on the Italian Facebook page were also examined to ascertain whether, drawing from the insights obtained from the analysis of the Italian, British, and US pages, the posts were adapted for an international audience during the translation process. The results showed that each of the three tourism authorities pursues its persuasive aims differently, trying to attract potential visitors with varying levels of interaction.

This article discusses the potential of classroom activities involving trainee translators in projects designed for nurturing a sound translation competence, underpinned by digital proficiency well beyond the mere mastery of resources and tools. In the current scenario, where knowledge is produced, transformed, transferred/translated and shared on a variety of platforms, a focus on collective learning and collaboration holds relevance for discussions surrounding contemporary translation practice and might contribute to a deeper awareness by students of their individual and collective roles as translators within an ever-expanding digital knowledge ecosystem. In this ecosystem, a paradigmatic role is played by Wikipedia, a platform offering invaluable pedagogical opportunities for action, interaction, and community-based knowledge creation via translation. This article intends to illustrate that Wikipedia-based activities do not simply offer trainee translators the opportunity to act as prosumers (Toffler 1981) of knowledge in a multilingual ecosystem where contents, ideas and knowledge move freely across language barriers, but also provide them with a unique opportunity to appreciate the impact of human translation in a world where generative Artificial Intelligence and machine translation play an increasingly dominant role.

The advancements in computing and artificial intelligence (AI) alongside the growing need for rapid and effective communication on a global scale are reshaping the landscape of translation, impacting the process, the product, and our understanding of translation. This is especially true for hybrid scenarios, which involve flexible equivalence between the source and target texts, e.g., in the translation of news, popularisation of scientific texts, transediting, and transcreation. These changes also affect existing Translation Quality Assessment (TQA) paradigms, whose scope, aims, and applications should evolve alongside these developments.

This paper engages in a reflective analysis of the historical evolution, present state, and potential future professional and didactic applications of TQA. After reviewing past paradigms, the paper looks into its contemporary applications within professional and educational settings. Special attention is given to the ISO 5060:2024 and its role in shaping TQA, as well as to the integration of computer-assisted revision in translator training. The paper then discusses how current TQA approaches can be adapted to hybrid settings and how they can expand their scope and applications to interact with new technologies. This is illustrated through two applied scenarios, one regarding the summary translation of a medical academic paper for non-expert readers, and the other involving the analysis of machine translation (MT) outputs to assess their quality for post-editing purposes, improving them through AI. The paper thus exemplifies how TQA can be adapted to hybrid translation scenarios and shows how error analysis can serve not only to assess MT quality, but also to determine whether and how to improve its output through automation.

This article introduces a method to identify and classify translation equivalences in multilingual news texts and applies it to the task of creating a corpus for the study of news translation, a notably challenging area within Translation Studies. The dataset is composed of 41 Greek-English news dispatches on the topic of migration by AMNA, the Greek national news agency. Conceptually, we build on previous research on ‘comparallel’ corpus architectures, which bring together features of comparable and parallel corpora and provide the necessary flexibility to account for the non-prototypical translated data characterizing multilingual news. The automated method uses state-of-the art Natural Language Processing techniques, namely sentence and word embeddings, which make it possible to account for nuanced translation relationships, distinguishing between translated, partially translated, related, and unrelated sentence pairs. We test the method against a benchmark of manually annotated sentences from the AMNA dataset and provide examples of correctly and incorrectly classified sentence pairs. We finally build a fully-fledged comparallel corpus based on the dataset and present a case study demonstrating how the corpus can be leveraged for corpus-assisted studies of news discourse, and most notably to investigate newsworthiness and ideological shifts occurring in multilingual news.

The successful history of Translation Studies (TS) as an academic discipline was founded on its ability to combine methods and insights from neighbouring disciplines and on its ongoing dialogue with the translation profession. Along the way, TS developed and refined a series of paradigms and tenets accepted by the majority of scholars. These include dichotomic distinctions such as ‘source vs target’, and an emphasis on translations as “facts of the target culture” (Toury 2012). In today’s post-globalized world, the international language regime is still largely one in which English acts as the global lingua franca and translation as “a tool of distribution” (Pym 2016) which operates on the basis of a one-to-many geometry hinging on the lingua franca. However, new socio-cultural and technical factors have emerged with a direct impact on the practice of cross-language communication. Superdiversity and cosmopolitanism (Bielsa 2016) are today features of most societies and communities. Technology has revolutionized access to information from the point of view of both producers and receivers, with content now available in new, mostly “disembodied” (Littau 2016), formats. Language-wise, English is playing an increasingly significant role as a target language, not only in international communication but also in English-speaking countries. This paper illustrates how human geographers and sociologists have described the ways in which space is being reconfigured in today’s highly interconnected societies, and describes some increasingly significant or common translation scenarios that result from these reconfigurations of space.