Volume 58, Issue 2

This essay compares Cécile Wajsbrot’s radio drama Beaune-la-Rolande with the German version by Hans Thill. I investigate the formal differences in length and structure between the two dramas, the different ways in which acoustic space and narrative text interact with each other, and the two works’ distinctive textual features, particularly the status of direct speech and the use of foreign languages. My analysis shows that translation problems can be due to language-pair issues, but can also be specific to the medium or the genre of the work, and that even the slightest shifts in meaning occurring in the translation can affect directing decisions.

Over the last years, TBX (TermBase eXchange) has become the main standard for terminology data exchange. However, the complexity of the standard has led to different implementation of TBX interfaces in professional terminology management tools that makes it difficult or impossible to exchange data even between different versions of the same tool without additional workarounds. The present article discusses how to easily migrate terminological data even in a worst-case scenario, namely from spreadsheet to TBX and back to spreadsheet, without any loss of information.

Students usually learn very quickly to deal with pragmatic and cultural translation problems, but very frequently lapse into repeating linguistic translation errors. A considerable amount of these errors are related to the use of collocations. This paper focuses on how to solve translation problems related to collocations by using corpus search techniques. Firstly, it gives an insight into the achievements obtained by using corpus linguistics methods in the teaching of a foreign language and in the training of translators. Secondly, different definitions of collocations will be presented and the strengths and limitations of different methods for the extraction of collocations from corpora will be commented. To round off this article, different parallel and comparable corpora will be presented and some corpus-based and corpus-driven exercises with comparable and parallel corpora will be designed to solve translation problems related to collocations.

As is widely known, when translators immerse themselves in new specialized fields they need to acquire knowledge of the topic and textual structure, without which it would be virtually impossible to interpret the source text (ST) meaning correctly. This is why we believe that developing quick and efficient acquisition of new knowledge must be a priority of translator training. In what follows, we present a case study method applied to German-language Ehevertrag, i.e. prenuptial agreements, which are a very specific type of notarial document. The method is applied in four phases. During the first phase, an initial diagnosis of pre-existing knowledge is conducted, leading to a second stage of case description and examination of all possibilities and/or alternatives available for systematic documentation. Once all available new information has been selected and prioritized in what comprises the third stage of our method, possible conclusions are drawn and applied not only to the task of interpreting the ST but also to the fourth-stage task of planning strategies and techniques for translating the ST.

This paper deals with the question how to use the creative resources of students in translation classes. It starts from the basic premise that every explicit concscious action, like formulating a translation, has its basis in implicit knowledge (cf. Joachim Renn, Übersetzungsverhältnisse). The explicitation of implicit knowledge always is an individual creative act which potentially differs (similar to Derrida’s differance) from every other act of translating the same item. By inducing the students to accept the fact of the creativity of human action the question of right and wrong in translation is relativized without abandoning a pragmatic grounding for the ensuing differing translations.

In this work we present the results of a study aimed at increasing performance quality in conference interpreting trainees through the development of the attention–regulatory practice of mindfulness. A review of the basic concepts of attention is presented as well as a review of the role of attention in interpreting as an extremely cognitive demanding task. The authors also introduce and review the concept of mindfulness from a theoretical and empirical perspective. Stress in interpreting is also addressed as a factor that may influence performance. An experimental study is presented in which focused attention practices are compared to relaxation practices in relation to performance in interpreting trainees.

Back translation is a common technique to assess the accuracy of translation, but its application in different contexts is often subject to controversy. The aim of the present paper is first to check the appropriateness of back translation for movie subtitling purposes on the one hand and on the other, to see which technique leads to a better translation, collaborative translation or back translation. To achieve this aim, 50 Persian sentences with problems in their translations were randomly selected from Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone subtitled by Kalhor (2001), the most commonly used subtittled version of this movie in Iran, and tested through back translation technique. The participants of the study were 90 undergraduate students of English translation at the University of Isfahan who had already watched the movie. The new translations suggested by the participants were then compared with the translations made in a collaborative way. A comparison of different versions of the sentences proved that back translation is an appropriate technique for testing the translation of subtitles. It was also revealed that students involved in collaborative translation outperformed those using the back translation technique.