Translation and Translanguaging in Multilingual Contexts - Volume 2, Issue 1, 2016

By looking at the Key Investor Information document (KIID), the present article shows how the area of finance is still considerably unexplored in Translation Studies, despite the increased interest that economic and financial texts have attracted among translation scholars in the last decade. The article describes the KIID and its background and then focuses on its relevance to Translation Studies, as well as to translation practice and, more generally, to society. Never before examined within Translation Studies, the KIID is a mandatory regulatory document aimed at retail investors, and its underlying financial product increases financing opportunities for companies, especially when crossing international borders, where the document’s translation into the target country’s language is compulsory. The KIID has very specific characteristics that make it a financial genre in its own right, due to grow in importance because of several factors. In the article, its main characteristics are presented and discussed from a Translation Studies perspective, on the basis of both the regulations that gave rise to it and a parallel and comparable corpus study.

Although everything is improvable, it can be said that Spanish translators and conference interpreters have dictionaries, glossaries and data banks available to do their work satisfactorily thanks to publishers of technical dictionaries, terminology teams of International Organizations, the Real Academia Española and the Real Academia de Ciencias Exactas, Físicas y Naturales. However, the situation is quite different in the press, the field of written language where all subjects of social interest are dealt with. The press is the main importer of loanwords, mostly unnecessary Anglicisms (of non-specialized fields but also of science and technology), and journalists make translation mistakes daily. Because of the considerable influence that journalists have on readers, the loanwords they use as well as their translation mistakes infiltrate the Spanish language. In this article, we analyse the situation in the translation of scientific and technological texts in the Spanish press and show examples of unnecessary loanwords as well as translation mistakes. We also include a brief glossary of 45 loanwords and translation mistakes in the military field.

Medical and pharmaceutical texts are full of references to chemical compounds, active ingredients and drugs. Guidelines will be given to recognise them, to translate them, if they should be written in upper- or lowercase, if they should or should not have an article, to know how to use hyphens in them or when words must be juxtaposed or not. By following the procedures given, an acceptable Spanish translation can be generated even if the translator is not a skilled chemist or pharmacist.

Lexicographical resources for the Italian-Spanish language combination are not as numerous as those found in other combinations, particularly as far as specialised lexicography is concerned. Against this background, this paper aims to present some of the most recent Italian-Spanish lexicographical resources with the purpose of reflecting on their contribution to solving the problems encountered in specialised translation training. With this aim in mind, the paper focuses on the world of Fashion, one of the main thematic areas tending to generate texts which are usually translated from Italian into Spanish.

Our societies are undergoing a process of transformation entailing new challenges. One of these challenges includes the urgency to address certain needs that arise from the rate of change affecting the multilingual and multicultural societies in which we live. In turn, new technologies, which involve the inevitable creation of new terms, are evolving rapidly as we try to incorporate them into our daily business. We live, therefore, with terminology, whether we are experts or not. In fact, there are a number of institutions with which we have an almost daily relationship and which have their own specialised languages. The question is how to handle these situations, what problems arise therein, and what the most immediate solutions are when this kind of event occurs in environments where terminology, specialised languages, and less widely used languages come into play. Throughout this chapter, and using all of the available information relevant to this matter, I will attempt to answer the following questions: Is specialised language used as part of the interaction between service providers and external users in the public services sector? How do participants handle such specific terminology? What types of documentation do mediators/translators and interpreters have access to? What strategies do they use when translating concepts or expressions into the target language? How reliable is their work? Is special training required? Are there specialised resources in less widely spoken languages that meet those needs?

In this article, a series of techniques and tools necessary for the translation of phraseological units are reviewed. Using Corpas Pastor’s contributions to the literature (2000a, 2000b, 2001) as a point of departure, we examine the assumptions on which they are based, to then go on to review two techniques proposed by Sevilla and Sevilla (2004), and by Sevilla Muñoz (2009), respectively: i.e. the actantial technique and the thematic technique. Finally, we review the major dictionaries in which phrases from Spanish and Italian are collected and highlight their strengths and weaknesses from the standpoint of the translation of the phraseology concerned.

The problem of equivalence in translation is sometimes falsely related to the translation of lexical meanings. In this paper we take the problem to the field of mapping cognitive functions among mental categories and their representations as concepts. This requires engaging all lexical and grammatical resources of the linguistic system and not solely considering vocabulary as the source of knowledge and information found in texts, be they oral or written. Thus, the problem of equivalence is solved by accepting the basic principles of translatability and synonymy, defined in terms of those mental contents that are behind the interpretation of complex linguistic expressions.

Police officers (hereafter referred to as transpreters) have a fundamental role and function as both ‘interpreters’ and ‘translators’ in the process of the administration of justice. This role and function hinges, oftentimes, on how the two agents, that is, the transpreters and the complainants, relate to each other. What is it that they represent? What do they stand to gain? What mechanisms are at play that they exploit to reach their various goals and desires? In discharging these roles and functions, transpreters in particular become actively engaged in the activities of listening to, visualising, then retelling and rewriting the complainants’ isiXhosa oral narrative text into the English language. All these laborious and tedious activities are conducted to compile sworn statements that become essential in the leading of a criminal investigation, as well as in compiling the evidence that is ultimately used in court. In this context, the ‘voices’ that inform the ‘styles’ in and through which the original narratives are reconstructed (as translations) into police records remain critical as part of the legal discourse in the South African criminal justice system. These ‘voices’ and ‘styles’ signal the extent to which sworn statements are mediated and manipulated.