The Global English Style Guide


Book Description

The Global English Style Guide illustrates how much you can do to make written texts more suitable for a global audience. Accompanied by an abundance of clearly explained examples, the Global English guidelines show you how to write documentation that is optimized for non-native speakers of English, translators, and even machine-translation software, as well as for native speakers of English. You'll find dozens of guidelines that you won't find in any other source, along with thorough explanations of why each guideline is useful. Author John Kohl also includes revision strategies, as well as caveats that will help you avoid applying guidelines incorrectly. Focusing primarily on sentence-level stylistic issues, problematic grammatical constructions, and terminology issues, this book addresses the following topics: ways to simplify your writing style and make it consistent; ambiguities that most writers and editors are not aware of, and how to eliminate those ambiguities; how to make your sentence structure more explicit so that your sentences are easier for native and non-native speakers to read and understand; punctuation and capitalization guidelines that improve readability and make translation more efficient; and how language technologies such as controlled-authoring software can facilitate the adoption of Global English as a corporate standard. This text is intended for anyone who uses written English to communicate technical information to a global audience. Technical writers, technical editors, science writers, and training instructors are just a few of the professions for which this book is essential reading. Even if producing technical information is not your primary job function, the Global English guidelines can help you communicate more effectively with colleagues around the world. This book is part of the SAS Press program.




Eco-Translatology


Book Description

This book offers a panoramic view of the emerging eco-paradigm of Translation Studies, known as Eco-Translatology, and presents a systematic study of the theoretical discourse from ecological perspectives in the field of Translation Studies. Eco-Translatology describes and interprets translation activities in terms of the ecological principles of Eco-holism, traditional Eastern eco-wisdom, and ‘Translation as Adaptation and Selection’. Further, Eco-Translatology approaches the phenomenon of translation as a broadly conceived eco-system in which the ideas of ‘Translation as Adaptation and Selection’, as well as translation as a ‘textual transplant’ promoting an ‘eco-balance’, are integrated into an all-encompassing vision. Lastly, Eco-Translatology reinforces contextual uniqueness, emphasizing the deep embeddedness of texts, translations, and the human agents involved in their production and reception in their own habitus. It is particularly encouraging, in this increasingly globalised world, to see a new paradigm sourced from East Asian traditions but with universal appeal and applications, and which adds to the diversity and plurality of global Translation Studies. This book, the first of its kind, will substantially expand the horizons of Translation Studies, a field that is still trying to define its own borders, and will open a wealth of new possibilities. Destined to become a milestone in the field of Translation, Interpretation and Adaptation Studies, as well as eco-criticism, it will introduce readers to a wholly new epistemological intervention in Translation Studies and therefore will open new vistas of thoughts, discussion and criticism.




Stylistic Approaches to Translation


Book Description

The concept of style is central to our understanding and construction of texts. But how do translators take style into account in reading the source text and in creating a target text? This book attempts to bring some coherence to a highly interdisciplinary area of translation studies, situating different views and approaches to style within general trends in linguistics and literary criticism and assessing their place in translation studies itself. Some of the issues addressed are the link between style and meaning, the interpretation of stylistic clues in the text, the difference between literary and non-literary texts, and more practical questions about the recreation of stylistic effects. These various trends, approaches and issues are brought together in a consideration of the most recent cognitive views of style, which see it as essentially a reflection of mind. Underlying the book is the notion that knowledge of theory can affect the way we translate. Far from being prescriptive, theories which describe what we know in a general sense can become part of what an individual translator knows, thus opening the way for greater awareness and also greater creativity in the act of translation. Throughout the discussion, the book considers how insights into the nature and importance of style might affect the actual translation of literary and non-literary texts.




Understanding and Translating Hybrid Texts


Book Description

This book outlines a new approach for considering the complex issue of hybridity and its translation. By building on the concept of translation as a three-phase process (reception, transfer and (re)production), it establishes the (contextual) function of hybrid elements in a text as the basis for translation or translation comparison based on a (focused) translation purpose. The model and methodology developed in the book provide the reader with operationalised tools for contextually abstracting the function of hybrid elements (Understanding Dimension) and using it as the basis for their transfer in another language (Translation Dimension).




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.




Translation and Style


Book Description

Style plays a major role in the translation of literary as well as non-literary texts, and Translation and Style offers an updated survey of this highly interdisciplinary area of translation studies. Jean Boase-Beier examines a variety of disciplines and theoretical approaches including stylistics, literary criticism, and narratology to investigate how we translate style. This revised and expanded edition of the 2006 book Stylistic Approaches to Translation offers new and accessible explanations on recent developments in the field, notably in the areas of Relevance Theory and cognitive stylistics. With many authentic examples to show how style affects translation, this book is an invaluable resource for both students and scholars working in translation studies and comparative literature.




Through the Dubbing Glass


Book Description




The Elements of International English Style


Book Description

This handbook - for anyone who needs to write English correspondence for an international business audience - integrates the theory and controversies of intercultural communication with the practical skills of writing and editing English for those who read it as a second language.




Language and Human Relations


Book Description

Exploring practices in the family, school, the workplace, this book investigates the varied ways people choose to address one another.




Is That a Fish in Your Ear?


Book Description

A New York Times Notable Book for 2011 One of The Economist's 2011 Books of the Year People speak different languages, and always have. The Ancient Greeks took no notice of anything unless it was said in Greek; the Romans made everyone speak Latin; and in India, people learned their neighbors' languages—as did many ordinary Europeans in times past (Christopher Columbus knew Italian, Portuguese, and Castilian Spanish as well as the classical languages). But today, we all use translation to cope with the diversity of languages. Without translation there would be no world news, not much of a reading list in any subject at college, no repair manuals for cars or planes; we wouldn't even be able to put together flat-pack furniture. Is That a Fish in Your Ear? ranges across the whole of human experience, from foreign films to philosophy, to show why translation is at the heart of what we do and who we are. Among many other things, David Bellos asks: What's the difference between translating unprepared natural speech and translating Madame Bovary? How do you translate a joke? What's the difference between a native tongue and a learned one? Can you translate between any pair of languages, or only between some? What really goes on when world leaders speak at the UN? Can machines ever replace human translators, and if not, why? But the biggest question Bellos asks is this: How do we ever really know that we've understood what anybody else says—in our own language or in another? Surprising, witty, and written with great joie de vivre, this book is all about how we comprehend other people and shows us how, ultimately, translation is another name for the human condition.