Volume 64, Issue 2

The international translation industry is undergoing fundamental changes with the potential of disrupting the market and the business basis of many freelance translators. This paper outlines the present scenario in the field of non-literary translations, its development, reasons, symptoms and current trends. Analogous to the established concept of “Industry 4.0”, the philosophy of an emerging new translation industry can be called “Translation 4.0”. Challenged by a continuously growing demand for translations, increasingly volatile markets, fierce global competition and aggressive pricing, the translation industry is responding with fully digitized data handling, real-time project management, strictly organized processes, quality control, short response times and comprehensive added-value services for clients. Key variables in this new work environment are fragmentation of projects to accelerate turn-around times, outsourcing, crowdsourcing, teamworking, connectivity, cloud-based translation platforms, integrated – and often compulsory – translation tools and, last but not least, machine translation (MT) and post-editing of MT (PEMT). Due to the closing gap between the quality of human translations (HT) and neural MT (in particular of DeepL), MT will cover a growing share of the low-end translation market volume, with the consequence that translators who cannot offer a substantially better value (i. e. quality/price ratio) than MT will become obsolete. The future will be for translators who have the competencies defined in the EMT (European Masters’ of Translation) and who adapt to the changing translation ecosystem.

Combining traditional methods with state-of-the-art corpus analysis, this article discusses problems associated with the translation of general academic lexis from German into English. In particular, it offers a more nuanced view on the often-made claim that there are ‘major differences’ between the two languages, many of which are said to stem from the spatial metaphorics underlying general academic German. Section 1 deals with problems that arise at the level of words and their lexico-syntactic environment, paying particular attention to spatial metaphor. Moving on to level of the paragraph, Section 2 continues the theme of spatial metaphor, showing how even quasi-terminological equivalents such as Struktur and structure exhibit subtle differences in use and may occasionally require re-metaphorization under the influence of the wider context. Section 3 provides a summary of the argument and suggests avenues for future research.

The article reports on the processing steps followed to build a bilingual parallel corpus (English-Spanish) as a resource for legal translation. The corpus, being in its initial stage of development, is made up of 127 and 145 aligned judgments referring to English and Spanish courts respectively. The corpus was aligned by using InterText alignment software, accounting for a total number of 29983 aligned sentence pairs. The paper describes the different design stages and the technical issues related to the compilation process.

The recent years have witnessed the emergence of new approaches in filmmaking including virtual reality (VR), which is meant to achieve an immersive viewing experience through advanced electronic devices, such as VR headsets. The VR industry is oriented toward developing content mainly in English and Japanese, leaving vast audiences unable to understand the original content or even enjoy this novel technology due to language barriers. This paper examines the impact of the subtitles on the viewing experience and behaviour of eight Arab participants in understanding the content in Arabic through eye tracking technology. It also provides an insight on the mechanism of watching a VR 360-degree documentary and the factors that lead viewers to favour one subtitling mode over the other in the spherical environment. For this end, a case study was designed to produce 120-degree subtitles and Follow Head Immediately subtitles, followed by the projection of the subtitled documentary through an eye tracking VR headset. The analysis of the eye tracking data is combined with post-viewing interviews in order to better understand the viewing experience of the Arab audience, their cognitive reception and the reasons leading to favour one type of subtitles over the other.

The current study aims to investigate the nature of Arab-Israeli conflict in Arabic political discourse. This study seeks to examine the possibility of using a corpus-driven study of semantic prosody to analyze Arabic political discourse. The researchers compiled a bi-directional parallel corpus that consists of two types of King Abdullah II’s of Jordan speeches (Arabic and English). Then the researchers used WordSmith Tools in order to obtain the data required, i. e., which mostly consist of collocations associated with five selected nouns, (‘Israel,’ ‘Palestine,’ ‘Arab,’ ‘Islam,’ and ‘terrorism’), respectively along with their frequency. The results show a variation in the collocations used with the five nouns in both types of speeches and a variation in the occurrence of these nouns. While reflecting different thematic focus, this variation suggests different ideologies.

With the development and renovation of digital information technology, images, sounds, animations, colors and other models are integrated into one system to convey information. Multimodality is also applied in language research. One example of multimodal discourse are tourism video commercials, which combine written, visual and auditory signals to construct the metaphorical meaning of advertisements. Therefore, this paper selects six pieces of German and Chinese tourism video commercials as objects, which are parsed, transcribed and annotated by ELAN 5.1. Both quantitative and qualitative approaches are adopted to analyze the selected corpus. The theoretical framework for this study is Systemic-Functional Grammar and Visual Grammar, and it aims to explore the similarities and differences in the fusion of multimodal features between German and Chinese tourism video advertisements by comparative analysis.

Based on the fact that a large body of works of German literature has been translated into Albanian, it may be concluded that we are dealing with the most translated literature into Albanian. The translation of German literature is characterised by similar motives, such as poetic and ideological, aiming at having a certain impact in certain circumstances. The aim of this paper is to set the path for future research, which is supposed to ignite interest in a general respect – cultural, as well as in a specific respect – literary.

The main objective of this study was to make a corpus-based comparison between two English translations of the Holy Quran in terms of metadiscourse features application and distribution. For this purpose, two English translations of the Holy Quran by Itani (2012) and Yousef Ali (1992) were selected as the corpus of the study. For the theoretical framework, the model of metadiscourse features proposed by Hyland (2005) was utilized. In order to check the distribution of metadiscourse features, Sketch Engine corpus software was used. The quantitative analysis of the data revealed that interactive metadiscourse features were higher in frequency than the interactional ones. Also, it was observed that within the interactive metadiscourse features, transitions were the most frequent type as compared with hedges which were the most frequent among the interactional ones. Finally, while in Yousef Ali’s translation, interactive metadiscourse features were the main trend, in Itani’s translation, the interactional metadiscourse features were the dominant attribute. The findings of this study have useful implications for researchers in translation as well as contrastive and corpus-based studies.

The present study analyses patterns of textual deixis (also known as text deixis or discourse deixis) in scientific and technical texts. Its particular focus is on the translational implications arising from the use of text deixis in European patent specifications. Patent specifications are among the most frequently translated LSP genres. Their linguistic and technical complexity and their highly standardized language present a considerable challenge for the translator. My analysis examines patterns of intratextual and intertextual deictic reference typical of the language of patents. Taking a pragmatic approach, it asks the question which functional types they represent and how they can be processed by the translator. In this context, light is also shed on the benefits gained from using CAT tools for the translation of culture-specific deictic elements in patent specifications. The database is a corpus of 40 complete original (i. e. non-translated) texts covering four of the most important languages in the patent translation market: English, German, Spanish and Italian.

This article investigates multimodal textuality in mobile advertising based on four Tinder ad campaigns. First, the article outlines theoretical approaches to the analysis of multimodal text with a special focus on mobile advertising. By highlighting formal and functional characteristics of the ad campaigns, the article then shows how different modes are used to create interactive advertisements to communicate with the app user and to promote products. The analysis illustrates how advertisers try to steer participation but also how the app user becomes a crucial part of this type of multimodal text. The article also draws comparison to other forms of multimodal text and gives an outlook on future research perspectives.

The article investigates cultural transfers related to the expression of time and indications of time in the German translation of Ousmane Sembène´s novel Le mandat / Die Postanweisung (The money order). The paper points out the significance of time, not only as an important parameter of the narration in the selected novel, but also in the way it is used by the different actors, and especially by the main actor Ibrahima Dieng, in social interactions and human relations. Furthermore, I investigate in this article how expressions related to time indications that are deeply rooted in the author’s domestic culture, are translated and/or transported in the German version of Sembène’s novel.

Using the example of Italian-German translation at departments of Romance languages, this article offers a snapshot of the current role of translation and its didactics in language studies in the German-speaking countries. The lecturers of the individual institutes were invited to take part in an online survey on the organisation and position of the translation courses in the curricula, on the content and methodological orientation of their own courses and on their own background. The results are incorporated into the old discussion on the subject of translating and acquiring translational skills in foreign language teaching. The article concludes with some ideas to integrate the findings of translation science and a reflection on learning objectives into a future conception of translation courses.