Across Languages and Cultures

Balsam Mustafa: ‘Islamic State’ in Translation. Bloomsbury Academic. 2022. x + 214 pp. ISBN 978-1-3501-5198-7 (hb), ISBN 978-1-3502-8021-2 (pb), ISBN 978-1-3501-5199-4 (epdf), ISBN 978-1-3501-5200-7 (ebook)

Mátyás Bánhegyi — Fri, 08 Sep 2023 00:00:00 +0200

Franz Pöchhacker: Introducing Interpreting Studies. 3rd edition. London and New York: Routledge, 2022, xix + 281 pp. ISBN 978-1-032-0305

Piroska Szentirmay — Fri, 08 Sep 2023 00:00:00 +0200

Claudine Borg: A Literary Translation in the Making: A Process-Oriented Perspective. Routledge, 2023. xi+234 pp. ISBN 978-0-367-71438-3 (hbk)

Chenchen Zhang; Yesheng Tan — Fri, 08 Sep 2023 00:00:00 +0200

Testing the working memory capacity of dialogue interpreters

Elisabet Tiselius — Fri, 08 Sep 2023 00:00:00 +0200

Allocation and management of working memory resources are crucial for successful interpreting. A number of studies have found clear indications that simultaneous interpreters have larger working memory capacity, at least in some areas, than other bilinguals (Ghiselli, 2022; Mellinger & Hanson, 2019 and Wen & Dong, 2019). Currently, no studies have focused on the working memory of dialogue interpreters. The study reported in this paper investigated the main differences and similarities in working memory between experienced and inexperienced dialogue interpreters when it comes to central executive functions. We also compared experienced dialogue interpreters to experienced simultaneous conference interpreters (Timarová 2012). 14 dialogue interpreters with Swedish and one of either French, Polish or Spanish as working languages, participated in the following working memory tests: tests for updating (2-back), inhibition (arrow flanker), attention-sharing, storage and processing (barrouillet, letter span, matrix span, operation span). We found no significant differences between the experienced and inexperienced dialogue interpreters, and there were significant differences between the experienced dialogue interpreters and the experienced simultaneous conference interpreters (n=28). Although the number of participants is small and the study therefore is exploratory, the study may serve as a baseline for future work on the cognition of dialogue interpreting.

Translation procedures in secondary term formation across languages in online glossaries: universal or language-specific?

Fri, 08 Sep 2023 00:00:00 +0200

Online terminological glossaries may play a key role in translating and disseminating terms in multiple languages, especially in those highly specialized domains where no other terminological sources are available. The influence of English as a lingua franca is undeniable in this process, shaping target language terminologies. The purpose of this paper is to explore types of secondary term formation and the related translation procedures as reflected in specialized online glossaries in the domain of start-up companies to find out whether they are universal or language-specific. The study investigates 28 online glossaries in five languages with a total of 1.567 terms. It is hypothesised that contact-based term formation with a considerable influence of English is significantly more frequent than interpretative term formation with little or no such influence. It is also proposed that among the translation procedures, transference is of the highest occurrence. According to the third hypothesis, languages differ in their preference for various translation procedures. Statistical tests have confirmed all three hypotheses. Our findings also shed light on lexical gaps, the attitudes of glossary editors – as language mediators – towards target language terminology, as well as the needs of users that glossaries seek to satisfy.

Testing simplification in translated and creative writing texts: the case of Robert van Gulik’s Judge Dee detective stories

Juqiang Chen; Hui Chang — Fri, 08 Sep 2023 00:00:00 +0200

Translational language has been reported to have unique characteristics, or translation universals, as compared to native non-translational production. One of the most widely studied features is simplification, i.e., translated texts tend to be less complex than non-translational texts. This study tested this hypothesis by comparing the translated and creative writing texts produced by a single author, Robert van Gulik, on the same topic Judge Dee’s detective adventures. Our well-controlled comparisons showed that the translated text was lexically less diverse, but syntactically more complex and overall less readable. The cognitive load of translation and the source text constrained the amount of vocabulary used in the translation compared with free writings. On the other hand, longer and more complex sentence could reflect translator’s efforts to state the information in a more explicit form when conveying the ancient Chinese detective stories to the Western world. Our research, thus, offers some insights into the investigation of the simplification hypothesis and the relation between translation and writing.

New technologies in the court:

Petra Lea Láncos — Fri, 08 Sep 2023 00:00:00 +0200

Fair trial is the cornerstone of all judicial proceedings and a fundamental right guaranteeing, among other things, the right to interpretation to those who do not understand and speak the language of the court. With the outbreak of the COVID pandemic, courts around the world struggled to continue adjudication, turning to the solution of remote hearings and hybrid interpretation to comply with requirements of both health policy and the right to linguistic presence in judicial proceedings. This paper describes the solutions applied in domestic, international and EU courts, shedding light on the shortcomings of remote hearings and their possible detrimental effects on interpretation and fair trial.

Exploring the Relevance and Relative Importance of Interpreting Aptitude Constructs and their Underlying Factors

Dr. Liu; Wei Zhang — Fri, 08 Sep 2023 00:00:00 +0200

This study aims to explore the relevance and underlying factors of an array of interpreting aptitude constructs, and, on that basis, the collective and group-specific perception of their relative importance. To meet the research purposes, a questionnaire survey was designed and distributed to interpreting trainers, trainees and professional interpreters, asking respondents to evaluate the relative importance of 40 aptitude constructs drawn from an extensive literature review. A total of 769 valid responses were collected. An explorative factor analysis retained 23 constructs divided into three factors focusing on cognitive skills for online information processing, personality traits and temperaments, and foundational linguistic skills respectively. While personality traits and temperaments were regarded as a stable and distinctive dimension of interpreting aptitude, cognitive skills for information processing were viewed as the most important factor. Particularly, listening and speaking in B enjoyed the highest rating. Although statistically significant differences existed in the relative importance of certain constructs, the substantive differences indicated by the effect sizes were small. Compared with trainees, trainers and professional interpreters demonstrated a more sharpened awareness of market demands and industrial priorities, but otherwise the three groups converged more than they differed in the evaluation of aptitude constructs and factors.

Beyond singability: Descriptive-explanatory analysis of Polish translations of Frank Sinatra’s My Way

Anna Rędzioch-Korkuz — Fri, 08 Sep 2023 00:00:00 +0200

Translation and music has become a subfield within translation studies, with numerous analyses discussing singable song translations from different vantage points. Most of them have been lyrics-oriented and emphasised the lack of semantic fidelity resulting mainly from the problem of singability. Though singability is an important factor influencing song translation, song texts function as coherent compositions in wider contexts of time and place, their performers or poetics of translators. While singability can be attained by various means, factors influencing actual translational choices often go beyond this feature. This article aims to present a multimodal and comparative analysis of three Polish song translations of Frank Sinatra’s My Way. By adopting a descriptive-explanatory approach it indicates that the actual choice of the translation strategy goes beyond singability and it is a much wider context of translation that determines the target song text.

Agenda-setting and Journalistic Translation: The New York Times in English, Spanish and Chinese

Roberto A. Valdeón — Fri, 08 Sep 2023 00:00:00 +0200

Drawing on the concepts of agenda-setting and framing, this article aims to examine the role played by translation in the selection of articles of the New York Times for the Spanish and Chinese versions. It analyses whether the three versions focus on similar topics and, therefore, follow a similar agenda, it aims to identify the topics that receive more salience via translation, and how these are complemented with texts specifically written for the translated/foreign language versions, as well as the framing mechanisms used by the writers and/or translators to create, suppress or accentuate ideological positionings. For that purpose, a constructed week methodology was used in order to collect a total of seventy articles per language. The analysis, based on Baker's adaptation of narrative theory and Kress and van Leeuwen's study of non-verbal signs, shows that the three versions of the New York Times vary in terms of format and content. Thus, while the English and Chinese versions focus on political and economic issues, the Spanish versions undergoes a process of tabloidization.