Intersemiotic Legal Translation


Book Description

The translation of legal documents in today’s globally interconnected world calls for novel approaches to overcoming traditional language barriers. The verbal language used in legal documents can be accompanied or even replaced by various types of semiotic resource, such as symbols, diagrams, and icons, while the advancement of digital tools and the introduction of new technologies offer those drafting contracts and other legal documents access to an ever-expanding toolbox for the translation process. This book makes a significant contribution to the existing literature on legal translation and intersemiotic translation by sharing valuable insights and opening up new avenues of inquiry, fostering further exploration of this evolving domain and enabling practitioners to use these diverse communication tools responsibly and effectively. Given the book’s structured multidisciplinary approach and extensive analyses of the characteristics of intersemiotic legal translation, its potential, and the complexities that arise at the intersection of law, language, and semiotics, it will appeal to legal practitioners, translators, semiotic scholars, and legal philosophers alike. Whether you are a legal professional aiming to expand your expertise, an academic seeking a new research direction, or are simply intrigued by the fascinating interplay of law, language, and semiotics, this book offers a valuable resource that sheds light on the unique dynamics of translating legal concepts using approaches other than traditional verbal communication. As such, it is an essential read for anyone who is interested in the changing landscape of law, language, and translation.




Translation and the Law


Book Description

This long needed reference on the innumerable and increasing ways that the law intersects with translation and interpreting features essays by scholars and professions from the United States, Australia, Hong Kong, Iceland, Israel, Japan, and Sweden. The essays range from sophisticated treatments of historical and hence philosophical variations in concept and practice to detailed practical advice on self-education. Essays show a particular concern for the challenges of courtroom discourse when the parties not only use different languages but operate from different cultural and legal traditions.




Research Methods in Legal Translation and Interpreting


Book Description

The field of Legal translation and interpreting has strongly expanded over recent years. As it has developed into an independent branch of Translation Studies, this book advocates for a substantiated discussion of methods and methodology, as well as knowledge about the variety of approaches actually applied in the field. It is argued that, complex and multifaceted as it is, legal translation calls for research that might cross boundaries across research approaches and disciplines in order to shed light on the many facets of this social practice. The volume addresses the challenge of methodological consolidation, triangulation and refinement. The work presents examples of the variety of theoretical approaches which have been developed in the discipline and of the methodological sophistication which is currently being called for. In this regard, by combining different perspectives, they expand our understanding of the roles played by legal translators and interpreters, who emerge as linguistic and intercultural mediators dealing with a rich variety of legal texts; as knowledge communicators and as builders of specialised knowledge; as social agents performing a socially-situated activity; as decision-makers and agents subject to and redefining power relations, and as political actors shaping legal cultures and negotiating cultural identities, as well as their own professional identity. Chapter 2 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license. https://tandfbis.s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/rt-files/docs/Open+Access+Chapters/9781138492103_oachapter2.pdf




Mouse or Rat?


Book Description

From the world-famous author of THE NAME OF THE ROSE, an illuminating and humorous study on the pleasures and pitfalls of translation. 'Translation is always a shift, not between two languages but between two cultures. A translator must take into account rules that are not strictly linguistic but, broadly speaking, cultural.' Umberto Eco is of the world's most brilliant and entertaining writers on literature and language. In this accessible and dazzling study, he turns his eye on the subject of translations and the problems the differences between cultures can cause. The book is full of little gems about mistranslations and misunderstandings.For example when you put 'Studies in the logic of Charles Sanders Peirce' through an internet translation machine, it becomes 'Studies in the logic of the Charles of sandpaper grinding machines Peirce'. In Italian 'ratto' has no connotation of 'contemptible person' but denotes speed ('you dirty rat' could take on a whole new meaning!) What could be a weighty subject is never dull, fired by Eco's immense wit and erudition, providing an entertaining read that illuminates the process of negotiation that all translators must make.




Translating across Sensory and Linguistic Borders


Book Description

This book analyses intersemiotic translation, where the translator works across sign systems and cultural boundaries. Challenging Roman Jakobson’s seminal definitions, it examines how a poem may be expressed as dance, a short story as an olfactory experience, or a film as a painting. This emergent process opens up a myriad of synaesthetic possibilities for both translator and target audience to experience form and sense beyond the limitations of words. The editors draw together theoretical and creative contributions from translators, artists, performers, academics and curators who have explored intersemiotic translation in their practice. The contributions offer a practitioner’s perspective on this rapidly evolving, interdisciplinary field which spans semiotics, cognitive poetics, psychoanalysis and transformative learning theory. The book underlines the intermedial and multimodal nature of perception and expression, where semiotic boundaries are considered fluid and heuristic rather than ontological. It will be of particular interest to practitioners, scholars and students of modern foreign languages, linguistics, literary and cultural studies, interdisciplinary humanities, visual arts, theatre and the performing arts.




Legal Machine Translation Explained


Book Description

Machine translation (MT) has made huge strides in the last few decades. In the legal field, however, there are only a few academic works dedicated to exploring how MT can be successfully applied in legal translation practice. There is currently a gap in the literature that concerns studies on the automated translation of legal documents drawn up by international law firms and/or tackled by legal translators. This book bridges this gap by providing an in-depth analysis of MT in legal practice. It explores whether, and to what extent, MT can be considered reliable, or at least acceptable, in the legal field and in legal practice. It investigates whether MT target texts can be used as drafts to be processed further (i.e., post-edited), how we might tackle MT’s shortcomings, and how MT tools could be supplemented with other language resources.




Re-Covered Rose


Book Description

When a reader picks up a book, the essence of the text has been translated into the visual space of the cover. Using Umberto Eco's bestseller The Name of the Rose as a case study, this is the first study of book cover design as a form of intersemiotic translation based on the purposeful selection of visual signs to represent verbal signs. As an act of translation, the cover of a book ought to be an 'equivalent representation' of the text. But in the absence of any established interpretive criteria, how can equivalence between the visual and the verbal be determined and interpreted? Re-Covered Rose tackles this question in an original and creative way, laying the foundation for a new research trend in Translation Studies. Marco Sonzogni is Senior Lecturer in Italian, School of Languages and Cultures, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. A widely published academic and an award-winning editor, poet and literary translator, he is the Director of the New Zealand Centre for Literary Translation/Te Tumu Whakawhiti Tuhinga.




Semiotics and the Problem of Translation


Book Description

Here is a radically interdisciplinary account of how Charles S. Peirce's theory of signs can be made to interact meaningfully with translation theory. In the separate chapters of this book on semiotranslation, the author shows that the various phenomena we commonly refer to as translation are different forms of genuine and degenerate semiosis. Also drawing on insights from Ludwig Wittgenstein and Walter Benjamin (and drawing analogies between their work and Peirce's) it is argued that through the kaleidoscopic, evolutionary process of unlimited translation, signs deploy their meaning-potentialities. This enables the author to throw novel light upon Roman Jakobson's three kinds of translation - intralingual, interlingual, and intersemiotic translation. Gorlée's pioneering study will entice translation specialists, semioticians, and (language) philosophers into expanding their views upon translation and, hopefully, into cooperative research projects.




On Translating Signs


Book Description

Translation produces meaningful versions of textual information. But what is a text? What is translation? What is meaning? And what is a translational version? This book On Translating Signs: Exploring Text and Semio-Translation responds to those and other eternal translation-theoretical questions from a semiotic point of view. Dinda L. Gorlée notes that in this world of interpretation and translation, surrounded by our semio-translational universe "perfused with signs," we can intuit whether or not an object in front of us (dis)qualifies as a text. This spontaneous understanding requires no formalized definition in order to "happen" in the receivers of text-signs. The author further observes that translated signs are not only intelligible for target audiences, but also work together as a "theatre of consciousness" or a "theatre of controversy" which the author views as powered by Charles S. Peirce's three categories of Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness. This book presents the virtual community of translators as emotional, dynamical, intellectual but not infallible semioticians. They translate text-signs from one language and culture into another, thus creating an innovative sign-milieu packed with intuitive, dynamic, and changeable signs. Translators produce fleeting and fallible text-translations, with obvious errors caused by ignorance or misguided knowledge. Text-signs are translatable, yet there is no such thing as a perfect or "final" translation. And without the ongoing creating of translated signs of all kinds, there would be no novelty, no vagueness, no manipulation of texts and - for that matter - no semiosis.




Research Handbook on Contract Design


Book Description

Weaving together theoretical, historical, and legal approaches, this book offers a fresh perspective on the modern revival of the concept of allegiance, identifying and contextualising its evolving association with theories of citizenship.