Volume 63, Issue 1

This paper describes an experiment dealing with the manipulation of style in consecutive interpreting in the context of the law. In it, several groups of Spanish law undergraduates assessed two performances by a consecutive interpreter. The interpreter in both performances translated a German-language lecture on constitutional law into Spanish, the only difference between the two renditions being the style used in the target language: in one of them, plain language; in the other, a style reminiscent of complex traditional legal drafting. The results of this study are presented and discussed in this paper, which combines the issue of plain language in legal translation and interpreting, with the concept of style as a quality parameter in interpreting. These results, which suggest that even the most junior law students have a liking for conventional elaborate drafting, should serve as elements of reflection for trainers of both legal professionals and interpreters.

Drawing on the examination of a national-specific industrial relations practice – Italy’s ammortizzatori sociali – this paper intends to provide an analysis of the strategies put in place by translators at the European Union to render peculiar concepts in English in official texts and to evaluate the translation process outcome in terms of effectiveness and clarity of meaning. To this purpose, a corpus of documents has been scrutinised that have been produced in Italian and then translated into English containing the expression ammortizzatori sociali . The findings of the analysis show that different approaches have been used by EU translators to render this notion which give rise to distinct outcomes as far as translation equivalence and faithfulness are concerned.

Video games have been a new and attractive type of entertainment in the Arab world ever since the emergence of computers, and they are still of interest to young Arabs today. Video game localization movements have set out to translate, and sometimes adopt, video games into several languages and settings. Nevertheless, localization into Arabic is still very recent. In this paper, an analysis of translation activities of video game Tomb Raider ™ (2013) is made in order to investigate the extent to which the translation of some selected linguistic assets in the aforementioned video game can be considered to incorporate what the notion of localization truly suggests. Moreover, this study attempts to define and evaluate the use of some deferent-perspective translation strategies as tools for assessing the scope of the translation and its target.

Legal translation is increasingly demanded in the professional market.When a translator tackles the translation of a source text from the same law system as to the target text the difficulties encountered may not prove very onerous. Nevertheless, when the translation brief comprises heterogeneous legal systems it places the translator into a difficult translation task. That is precisely the case of Common Law versus Civil Law and the legislation arising therefrom: Procedural Law. In this paper we will explain the features of procedural legal discourse and the tools for providing an adequate translation (English-Spanish/Spanish-English) for the terminology and phraseology identified in our bilingual corpus.

In this paper, I explore the validity of the retranslation hypothesis – that the first translation of a text tends to be more target culture oriented than subsequent translations – in representations of certain Biblical concepts in the translations of the Bible into Igbo. Specifically I investigate instances of lexical borrowings in the first complete translation of the Bible into Igbo because, following from the hypothesis, subsequent translations of the Bible should also borrow the same items. I discover that most of the borrowings in the first translation are de-borrowed in the retranslations, while the retained borrowings undergo various forms of grapho-phonological adjustments to reflect the Igbo linguistic system. Thus, the retranslation hypothesis is not validated in this study. I trace this choice of indigenization in the subsequent translations to the agents involved in the translations. Being specialists in Igbo Studies, they understand the Igbo linguistic system better than the agents of the first translation who were mainly European missionaries with little knowledge of the language system. Unlike the missionaries, these Igbo agents are not only interested in having the Bible in Igbo, but also in having it in an Igbo that is in sync with the way the language is actually used.

Medical interpreting has a great deal of importance in Spain, which is mainly due to both the large number of residents from English-speaking countries attended in hospitals and, especially, health tourism (Observatorio Europeo de Sistemas y Políticas de Salud, 2010; Escuela de Organización Industrial y la Secretaría de Estado de Turismo, 2013 b; Instituto Nacional de Estadística, 2015). Consequently, it is essential that interpreters have the tools they need to carry out their work as efficiently and effectively as possible (Hale, 2010; Angelelli, 2015; Postigo Pinazo, 2015), especially in the terminology field, which constitutes one of the biggest difficulties in biomedical interpretation (Roat/Creeze, 2015). Thus, and based on past research (Postigo Pinazo/Lavado Puyol, 2015), a self-designed survey-based study and the evaluation of the existing terminological resources, in this article we will present a new terminological and research tool intended for interpreters, translators and health professionals: TermiMED.

Since September 2016, when Google implemented the neural machine translation (NMT) technique in Google Translate (GNMT), the overall quality of machine translation (MT) has improved significantly, narrowing the gap between MT and human translation (HT). One detail aspect of MT quality is how the system can cope with the translation of proper names and numbers, so-called Named Entities (NEs). This paper outlines the principles underlying the GNMT translation of NEs and analyzes form changes including errors that are encountered during NMT-based translation and the causes of those form changes. First, on the basis of Wu et al. (2016), a simple model for GNMT-based NE translation is created, and within this model NE translations in 60 target texts are analyzed and compared to those of a professional translator. According to this model, GNMT-derived NE-form changes can roughly be attributed to four causes: segmentation, memory, features of training corpora, and functionality in the attention system.

The present paper is concerned with the German adnominal demonstrative pronouns dessen und deren when these are used in place of the third-person possessive pronouns, in order to avoid ambiguities in resolution (Hans 1 arbeitet mit Max 2 und seiner 1/2 Frau / Hans 1 arbeitet mit Max 2 und dessen 2 Frau ‘Hans works with Max and his wife’). The central aim of the paper is to present and discuss the different possibilities available in Italian to translate German dessen und deren . The investigation is carried out on the basis of a corpus of literary texts.

This paper deals with the analysis of evaluative expressions gut and schlecht in the corpus of dialogues from the novel „Herr der Diebe“ by Cornelia Funke. The hypothesis was that gut and schlecht always have an evaluative function and that they are linked with emotions as the background of evaluation. Evaluative expressions are described on the following levels: first, it is shown what is evaluated with these adjectives. The application of the appraisal theory by Martin and White (2005) shows which categories the evaluation collocations refer to. Finally, the translation of evaluative expressions from the source text into the target text in Croatian is investigated.