FORUM. Revue internationale d’interprétation et de traduction / International Journal of Interpretation and Translation - Volume 15, Issue 1, 2017

Translation can serve the purposes of gaining, maintaining and even abusing political power in the interests of certain political groups. In order to identify political manipulation in translated texts, a text linguistics based tool called Political Bias Screener has been developed, which includes superstructure and macrostructure analysis, critical discourse analysis and political mass communication related theories. This article describes the most relevant theoretical foundations and the component models of the Screener, investigates its validity and reliability and introduces the most important research findings obtained with its help. The findings show possible tendencies of translator behaviour and are transferable to other research fields in Translation Studies.

The first seventeen years of the People’s Republic of China (PRC, 1949–1966) was a critical period for the newly established nation to gain international recognition. The period witnessed a unique translation activity, i.e. SL-generated translation of a large number of classical and modern Chinese literature into English and other foreign languages. These state-sponsored translations were mainly undertaken by teams of Chinese and foreign translators in the Foreign Languages Press (FLP) in Beijing. This paper aims to explore how literary translation was used for nation branding and promoting Chinese communism abroad. It reveals the political agenda behind the outward translation activity. It goes on to probe into the patronage of the FLP to disclose the relationship between the translating institution and the political discourse on the nation. Lastly, the study of the English translation of Linhai Xueyuan (林海雪原), i.e. Tracks in the Snowy Forest, a bestseller representative of the ‘revolutionary novel’ of the time, will show that the adaptations aim at recasting revolutionary characters as “perfect” heroes so as to project an ideal image of the modern Chinese nation. The paper concludes with a call to integrate outward translation into TS. Based on Luhmann’s sociology of communication it provides a preliminary observation on the reception of the PRC’s export enterprise, which, more often than not, turned out to be counterproductive.

According to the results of translation-based empirical research within the descriptive paradigm, transfer operations and the shifts that occur as a result of translators’ interventions are governed by norms, which represent general, standard practices built on informal social consensus ( Toury 1995 ). Based on the scientific analysis of norms and general rules, the so-called translation universals were formulated describing the factors and qualities that distinguish translations from source texts and from authentic texts not produced through translation but originally written in the target language ( Baker 1993 ). In the present study, I aim to summarise the theoretical conclusions drawn so far from the description of these observed translational features, as well as the results of the research into linguistic phenomena and laws that characterise translations in general, then I will synthesise and graphically represent the lessons learned in a theoretical model. Hopefully, it will provide help to understand and process the research data gained so far and in the future.

Translation scholars have been applying the Gricean maxims as analytical tools to handle pragmatic issues in translation. Not always this genuine application is successful regarding that the maxims are culture-bound in nature and may not have the same utility in a different culture and/or in translation. Rarely any attempts have been done to adjust these maxims to the needs of translation. The present article, while does not intend to criticize the basic applicability of the maxims in translation, aims at reformulating them, within a framework of faithfulness, to be more flexible and responsive to the needs of translation. To illustrate this and evaluate the maxims, examples are analyzed and re-analyzed.

Drawing on social and cognitive models of news frame theory and argumentative approach to political discourse analysis, we studied how a declaration made by an Iranian general about revoking the citizenship of Bahrain uprising movement’s leader was selectively translated and reframed in 7 English news websites. The findings revealed that the reframed texts, on the one hand, suppressed the values and circumstantial premises of the declaration, and on the other hand, reframed the text in such a way that portrayed Iran as an interventionist seeking sectarianism in Bahrain. This study indicated that what underwent shift were not just arbitrary words and phrases; rather, the whole frame was reconfigured according to the interests of the news websites. In this process, selective translations were merely used as incontrovertible proof to support the frame buttressed by the target news websites.

Un grand défi à relever par les étudiants pendant la traduction vers la langue B est de reformuler le message de manière pertinente. Le présent article vise à expliquer, à la lumière de la théorie BT proposée par Fauconnier et Turner, ce processus cognitif dans la perspective de l’intégration conceptuelle. A travers les exemples de traduction du chinois en français, nous essayons de démontrer d’une part que la relation vitale est nécessaire à la capture du sens pertinent, d’autre part que la structure émergente est souvent source de créativité en reformulation vers la langue acquise.

The article discusses how black people were portrayed in the Slovenian translations of the novels Winnetou, Old Surehand and Der Schatz im Silbersee, which have all been translated into Slovenian several times; the analysis thus reveals how translation strategies have changed over the decades. The comparison shows that the strategies in translations published in the 1930s were somewhat different from those in the post-World War II period, when the Slovenian territory was part of socialist Yugoslavia; because of the unacceptability of racist views during the socialist period, some racist passages of the original texts were censored in the translations. A substantial amount of neutralization of pejorative racial terminology occurred in both pre- and post-War translations, and translators in both eras also used similar strategies for translating black people’s sociolect. The interventions in the translations have somewhat affected how the translated works can be interpreted.

The title of an invention allows the reader to understand the significance of a patent claim, and the wording of the title recurs throughout the subsequent patent documentation. If the translation of the title is erroneous, the quality of the translation in other parts of the patent documentation also suffers. This research involved using linguistic evaluation to identify common translation errors in Chinese–English machine translations of patent titles and examine the quality of machine-translated patent titles. Special focus was placed on orthographic, morphological, lexical, semantic, and syntactic errors found in patent titles. We sought to answer the following questions: (1) What are the trends in the application of machine translation in the Taiwan Intellectual Property Office (TIPO)? (2) How is the quality of machine translation controlled at TIPO? (3) What are common errors in machine-translated patent titles? Through analysis of our findings, it is possible to estimate the level of effort required from a posteditor following translation, and to suggest methods of improving machine translations of patent titles. This study also generates information applicable to the training of patent translators and posteditors.

The present study investigates the effect of memory training on the quality of interpreting by Farsi-to-English interpreter trainees, with special attention to diminishing the rate of omission of message elements. Participants were assigned to two groups on the basis of their overall performance on a TOEFL test, with equal division between genders. The control group was taught interpreting skills by the routine curriculum, while the experimental, group spent part of the time on memory training exercises, e.g. imagination and story retelling. Three raters assessed the accuracy of interpreting, omissions, additions, grammar, expression, terminology, pace and accentuation in the trainees’ pre-test and post-test performance. Statistical analysis shows that the memory training had a positive effect on the quality of interpreting, particularly so on decreasing the omission rate. The results have implications for curriculum designers of interpreting programs, material producers and all who are involved in interpreting studies and its pedagogy.