Translation Competence and Language Contrast – A Multi-Method Study


Book Description

Experience in translation does not always correlate with the quality of the target text. Also, the evaluations of translation work vary considerably among evaluators. Why not shifting the focus of attention from the final translation to the underlying translation process when assessing translation competence? Iryna Kloster applies a multi-method approach to model the translation competence based on empirical parameters, such as gaze behavior, dictionary use, revisions as well as subjective evaluations of comprehension and translation difficulty. Eye tracking, keystroke logging, screen recording and retrospective interviews were applied to collect data in the experimental groups consisting of novice and semi-professional translators. As a consequence, the author suggests using language contrasts for researching translation competence. She draws conclusions based on hypotheses testing, provides justification by triangulating quantitative and qualitative data and discusses the results in the light of empirical translation studies as well.




Languacultural Hybridity and Translation


Book Description

In an increasingly globalised world, the cultures of Orient and ­Occident are no longer firmly separated. This hybridity is also a part of literature—a concept which needs to be explored in Translation Studies. This study examines its evolution across language, culture, literature, and translation. It introduces a sociolinguistic approach for studying marginalized hybrid texts and their translations into English, focusing on the power dynamics that dichotomize the world into First/Third worlds. The author examines how sociological factors in central societies affect the acceptance and recognition of marginalized literary works within Western literary circles and world literature. The study analyses classical and modern Persian literature. It highlights the double-voicedness in these texts. By illustrating how hybrid elements from Rúmí’s mystical poems and Hidáyat’s surrealistic prose are re­created in their English translations, it elevates the analysis of hybrid elements to a languacultural level.




[Re]Gained in Translation I


Book Description

Translations of the Bible take place in the midst of tension between politics, ideology and power. With the theological authority of the book as God’s Word, not focusing on the process of translating is stating the obvious. Inclinations, fluency and zeitgeist play as serious a role as translators’ person, faith and worldview, as do their vocabulary, poetics and linguistic capacity. History has seen countless retranslations of the Bible. What are the considerations according to which Biblical retranslations are being produced in current, 21st century, contexts? From retranslations of the Hebrew Bible to those of the Old and New Testaments, to mutual influences of Christian and Jewish translational traditions – the papers collected here all deal with the question of what is to be [re]gained with the production of a new translation where, at times, many a previous one has already existed.




[Re]Gained in Translation II


Book Description

Times are changing, and with them, the norms and notions of correct­ness. Despite a wide-spread belief that the Bible, as a “sacred original,” only allows one translation, if any, new translations are constantly produced and published for all kinds of audiences and purposes. The various paradigms marked by the theological, political, and historical correctness of the time, group, and identity and bound to certain ethics and axiomatic norms are reflected in almost every current translation project. Like its predecessor, the current volume brings together scholars working at the intersection of Translation Studies, Bible Studies, and Theology, all of which share a special point of interest concerning the status of the Scriptures as texts fundamentally based on the act of translation and its recurring character. It aims to breathe new life into Bible translation studies, unlock new perspectives and vistas of the field, and present a bigger picture of how Bible [re]translation works in society today.




Translation and Circulation of Migration Literature


Book Description

In the field of Translation Studies no book-length work in English has yet been dedicated to the translation and circulation of migration literature. The authors of this volume seek to contribute to filling this gap through a detailed study of texts belonging to a variety of literary genres and engaging with the phenomenon of migration in different parts of the world. Not only will the challenges met by translators be discussed, but the different ways in which the translated texts travel from one cultural sphere to another will also be explored. The focus lies on the themes “migration and politics”, “migration and society”, as well as “the experience of migration in words, music and images”.




[Re]Gained in Translation, Volume 1–2


Book Description

Volume 1: Translations of the Bible take place in the midst of tension between politics, ideology and power. With the theological authority of the book as God’s Word, not focusing on the process of translating is stating the obvious. Inclinations, fluency and zeitgeist play as serious a role as translators’ person, faith and worldview, as do their vocabulary, poetics and linguistic capacity. History has seen countless retranslations of the Bible. What are the considerations according to which Biblical retranslations are being produced in current, 21st century, contexts? From retranslations of the Hebrew Bible to those of the Old and New Testaments, to mutual influences of Christian and Jewish translational traditions – the papers collected here all deal with the question of what is to be [re]gained with the production of a new translation where, at times, many a previous one has already existed. Volume 2: Times are changing, and with them, the norms and notions of correctness. Despite a wide-spread belief that the Bible, as a “sacred original,” only allows one translation, if any, new translations are constantly produced and published for all kinds of audiences and purposes. The various paradigms marked by the theological, political, and historical correctness of the time, group, and identity and bound to certain ethics and axiomatic norms are reflected in almost every current translation project. Like its predecessor, the current volume brings together scholars working at the intersection of Translation Studies, Bible Studies, and Theology, all of which share a special point of interest concerning the status of the Scriptures as texts fundamentally based on the act of translation and its recurring character. It aims to breathe new life into Bible translation studies, unlock new perspectives and vistas of the field, and present a bigger picture of how Bible [re]translation works in society today.




Translating Minorities and Conflict in Literature


Book Description

Minorities and Conflict are prevailing topics in literature and translation. This volume analyses their occurrence by focussing on the key domains: censorship/manipulation, translation flows from the linguistic periphery, and reflections on self-expression. The case studies presented discuss (re)translations of authors such as Virginia Woolf and treat a wide variety of languages, such as Flemish literature in Czech or Russian translations of Estonian prose. They also treat relevant topics such as heteroglossia, de-colonialism, and self-translation. The texts in this volume were originally presented at the conference Translating Minorities and Conflict in Literature, held in June 2021. In an increasingly interconnected and complex global landscape they advocate transparency, accountability, and the preservation of linguistic diversity.




Writer-reader Interaction by Metadiscourse Features


Book Description

The nature of interaction between authors and readers of written texts varies from language to language. This is particularly evident in specialized texts and their translations. Mehrdad Vasheghani Farahani unveils the distributional pattern of metadiscourse features as well as the writer-reader interaction in translations of legal and political texts in an English-Persian context. Using a corpus-based methodology and resorting to parallel and reference corpora, he explores systematically the use of metadiscourse features and their distribution in original texts and in translations in English and Persian. In addition, parallel concordance lines are used to examine the way writer-reader interaction is constructed and guided in translation and non-translation language in English and Persian.




Problem solving activities in post-editing and translation from scratch


Book Description

Companies and organisations are increasingly using machine translation to improve efficiency and cost-effectiveness, and then edit the machine translated output to create a fluent text that adheres to given text conventions. This procedure is known as post-editing. Translation and post-editing can often be categorised as problem-solving activities. When the translation of a source text unit is not immediately obvious to the translator, or in other words, if there is a hurdle between the source item and the target item, the translation process can be considered problematic. Conversely, if there is no hurdle between the source and target texts, the translation process can be considered a task-solving activity and not a problem-solving activity. This study investigates whether machine translated output influences problem-solving effort in internet research, syntax, and other problem indicators and whether the effort can be linked to expertise. A total of 24 translators (twelve professionals and twelve semi-professionals) produced translations from scratch from English into German, and (monolingually) post-edited machine translation output for this study. The study is part of the CRITT TPR-DB database. The translation and (monolingual) post-editing sessions were recorded with an eye-tracker and a keylogging program. The participants were all given the same six texts (two texts per task). Different approaches were used to identify problematic translation units. First, internet research behaviour was considered as research is a distinct indicator of problematic translation units. Then, the focus was placed on syntactical structures in the MT output that do not adhere to the rules of the target language, as I assumed that they would cause problems in the (monolingual) post-editing tasks that would not occur in the translation from scratch task. Finally, problem indicators were identified via different parameters like Munit, which indicates how often the participants created and modified one translation unit, or the inefficiency (InEff) value of translation units, i.e. the number of produced and deleted tokens divided by the final length of the translation. Finally, the study highlights how these parameters can be used to identify problems in the translation process data using mere keylogging data.




Multicultural Health Translation, Interpreting and Communication


Book Description

Multicultural Health Translation, Interpreting and Communication presents the latest research in health translation resource development and evaluation, community and professional health interpreting, and the communication of health risks to multicultural populations. Covering a variety of research topics in empirical health translation and interpreting, this advanced resource will be helpful for research students and academics of translation and interpreting studies who have an interest in health issues, particularly in multicultural and multilingual societies. This edited volume brings in interdisciplinary expertise from areas such as translation studies, community interpreting, health communication and education, nursing, medical anthropology and psychology, and will be of interest to healthcare professionals, language services in multilingual societies and researchers interested in communication between healthcare providers and users.