FORUM. Revue internationale d’interprétation et de traduction / International Journal of Interpretation and Translation - Volume 22, Issue 2, 2024

At the heart of media globalization lies pivot subtitling – an indirect translation method that facilitates accessibility and cultural diversity in a vastly multilingual mediascape. Conducted between September 2022 and April 2023, this survey targeted 80 Turkish subtitlers who translated Korean content for various subscription video-on-demand (SVoD) platforms. The study aims to understand the working conditions of Turkish pivot subtitlers, elicit recommendations, and provide insights to industry stakeholders. The findings reveal a lack of uniformity within pivot subtitling workflows across SVoD platforms, highlighting the need for standardized working conditions. The study also addresses the quality assurance of pivot subtitles and templates, emphasizing the absence of consistent procedures in post-submission processes. The results call for measures to uphold equitable working conditions for pivot subtitlers, underscored by achieving uniformity in workflows, and a commitment to confront systemic challenges that disincentivize direct translation in favor of indirect translation via pivot templates.

In formative assessment, teacher feedback can enhance student learning. To reap such benefits, educators need to deliver feedback in such a way that arouses students’ learning interest, invites their active engagement, and inspires follow-up action. We report on an exploratory qualitative study that compares two modalities of teacher feedback, namely, written versus audio feedback, provided to a group of 41 students in a consecutive interpreting course. Our qualitative content analysis of the students’ responses to the questionnaire reveals 25 lower-order themes, categorized into seven higher-order themes concerning inherent properties (informational, structural, and prosodic) and consequential aspects (communicative, functional, affective, and metacognitive) of written/audio feedback. Overall, the results seem to show the students’ preference for the audio feedback, because of its informativeness, specificity, interactivity, and affective/cognitive benefits. We discuss these results in terms of students’ learning gains, learning style, task-feedback alignment, and relationship between feedback specificity and modality for interpreter training.

In recent years, digital transformation has profoundly impacted a wide range of professions, including interpreting. As technology advancements continue to develop rapidly, it is imperative for interpreters to be able to work in a digital environment and use different tools than in traditional workplaces (Sang 2020). Against this backdrop, this paper examines a post-training survey administered by the Korean Association of Translators and Interpreters (KATI) following their digital literacy academy seminar and offers recommendations for future implementations. Three research questions guide this paper: (1) What do trainees expect from the digital literacy training provided by the association? (2) What kind of training do trainees want to see in the future? (3) What are interpreters’ expectations for the future development of Computer-Assisted Interpreting (CAI)? The research includes a descriptive account of KATI’s first rollout of digital literacy training for interpreters in Korea and an analysis of the post-training survey, followed by implications for future training.

Characterizing Venuti’s foreignizing and domesticating strategies as historically dependent, this article attempts to shed some new light on how such translations – especially the foreignizing ones – emerge in any language. After discussing the roots of Venuti’s thinking in the American context and redefining foreignization as a strategy that draws on domestic, yet marginalized, elements, we delve into the theory and practice of two Persian translators, Ahmad Shamlu and Mir Shamseddin Adib-Soltani. Although their translation practices are ostensibly domesticating, they possess underlying foreignizing qualities. The implications and intellectual origins of their practices are discussed in the Iranian context, giving rise to a theoretical perspective that allows for foreignizing in non-Anglophone cultures.

Subtitling Hollywood films with religious taboo words for conservative and closed societies, such as an Arab society, is a difficult task. This study investigates the dominant religious terms and functions used in Hollywood films and to identify the dominant translation strategies used for them in Arabic subtitles and determines whether these strategies are source language-oriented or target language-oriented (domesticating or foreignising). A corpus of 90 Hollywood films released between 2000 and 2018 is used to answer these questions; insights from descriptive translation studies are also taken (Toury, 2012). The corpus is analysed quantitatively and qualitatively using a self-designed, parallel and aligned corpus of 90 films and their Arabic subtitles. Findings reveal that the functions of religious taboo words have significant impacts on the choices of subtitling strategies. Foreignization strategies are used in roughly two-thirds of all occurrences of religious taboo words despite the cultural distance between English and Arabic. Using Modern Standard Arabic in Arabic subtitles limits subtitlers’ linguistic options. Furthermore, the nature of audio-visual translation influences subtitler choices because the meaning of a word can appear on the screen as a gesture, image or sound.

Translation and activism have been closely linked in the scholarly discourse. It is hard to parse out, however, the goals and contours of a specifically literary translation activism (LTA), particularly as it may intersect with literary activism, literary advocacy, and other forms of praxis. What constitutes an act of literary translation activism? And what forms are literary translation activism taking, and how does a text become activist? The answers have implications for literary translators’ self-concept, agency, and identity construction as well as the ethics involved. LTA is manifested in prizegiving, framing, choice of language, adapting, choosing texts (or even refusing translation), translation strategy, memorializing, heightening status, ‘reinventing’ literary affiliation, and changemaking or awareness-raising for extraliterary causes. After taking stock of some of literary translation activism’s forms and even caveats, I draw some paths for a pedagogy of LTA, which can play a constitutive role in drawing the field’s boundaries.