Volume 65, Issue 1

MTI programs in industry-specific universities have drawn little scholarly attention due to their short history and small scale, but they have irreplaceable advantages in training translators for specific industries because of their time-honored and well-established industry-specific disciplines and programs. For this reason, this paper focuses on MTI programs granted in 2014 in 16 industry-specific universities, which cover a variety of industries, including civil aviation, medicine, forestry, agriculture, post and telecommunications, architecture, ocean, petrol, electric power and water resources. All these MTI programs were subjected to the assessments by China National Committee for Translation and Interpreting Education in 2018. By inspecting their assessment data concerning teachers, students, training objectives, programs and characteristic courses, as well as horizontal communications with other disciplines of the respective universities and with language services companies, and by interviewing nine teachers from the universities concerned, the authors discuss the merits and demerits of these MTI programs. The paper concludes by offering some suggestions to translator training in China and beyond.

The use of rhyming slang in British and Irish football is a relatively recent phenomenon that has sometimes been noted in passing, but never studied in detail. How is this type of lexis created? And, equally important, why do football lovers find it useful? Drawing mainly on examples from print and online sources, this article examines the linguistic features of the specialist rhyming slang of football, how it is coined and what it is that makes it so appropriate for the beautiful game. The final part of the article provides a glossary of terms and nicknames, many of which have hitherto escaped the notice of lexicographers.

Titles play an important role in genre analysis. Cross-genre studies show that research paper and thesis titles have distinctive features. However, thesis and dissertation titles in the field of dentistry have thus far received little attention. Objective : To analyze the syntactic structures and their functions in English-language thesis and dissertation titles in dentistry. Methodology : We randomly chose 413 titles of English-language dentistry theses or dissertations presented at universities in 12 countries between January 2000 and June 2019. The resulting corpus of 5,540 running words was then analyzed both qualitatively and quantitatively, the two complementary focuses being grammatical structures and their functions. Results : The average title length was 13.4 words. Over half of the titles did not include any punctuation marks. For compound titles, we found that colons, dashes, commas, and question marks were used to separate the different components, colons being the most frequent. Four syntactic structures (nominal phrase, gerund phrase, full-sentence, and prepositional phrase) were identified for single-unit titles. Single-unit nominal phrase titles constituted the most frequent structure in the corpus, followed by compound titles. Four particular rhetorical combinations of compound title components were found to be present throughout the corpus. Conclusions : Titles of dentistry theses and dissertation in English echo the content of the text body and make an important contribution to fulfilling the text’s communicative purposes. Thus, teaching research students about the linguistic features of thesis titles would be beneficial to help them write effective titles and also facilitate assessment by teachers.

Legal and courtroom figures always entail severe difficulties for both expert translators and translation trainees. They are a very fair reflection of the current society, and its organisation. When the translator is working with diverse legal systems (the British and the Spanish one), their complexity becomes stronger. Therefore, in this paper we will deal with the (English-Spanish) translation of the most representative and challenging courtroom figures from the UK and Spain by using the translation techniques applicable to court terminology.

Social interpretation allows foreigners to access public services in a country whose language or culture they do not know. Thanks to interpreters in public services, communication between user and provider can take place, becoming a necessary tool to overcome the language barrier. However, in many cases the interpreter is exposed to difficult situations, since the people who use these services are in a situation of vulnerability and share traumatic experiences they have suffered. Because of these intense stories, interpreters for public services often suffer work-related stress. This study aims, through a survey distributed among professional interpreters, to find out the level of stress they face and thus, with the results obtained, to create a protocol with different strategies to help students studying Translation and Interpretation to perform an interpretation in public services avoiding or minimising the appearance of stress.

The current article primarily aims at analysing the strategies utilised by quintessential translators of F. Villon to render into Spanish the figures of diction and thought that characterise the poetry of the 14th-century author, following the classical classification proposed by Abrams (1953). A second objective is to suggest a set of guidelines on how to translate the figurative use of discourse into a given target-language text. Accordingly, this article will first provide an overview on the most relevant approaches to poetry translation, which especially concern relaying the figurative language of a source into a target-language text. Moreover, it will analyse a set of examples that best illustrate the distinctive use of rhetorical devices by Villon, and will examine the ways to better transforming them into another target language, namely Spanish. Lately, this article will propose a set of translation guidelines for both the figures of diction and thought that permeate his poetry.

Translators and interpreters operating in the war zone face numerous factors that alter their cognitive and emotional capabilities, among which: fear, anxiety troubles and post-traumatic stress disorder. This article explains the cerebral processes that generate anxiety, emotion and cognitive complexity, advances the new notion of “laboratory stress” and establishes the link between these processes and anxiety and decision‑making. Finally, the article suggests emergency exists such as positive appraisal and the innovative notion of sociocognitive counter‑conditioning .

This paper will focus on the role that source texts from early reader children’s literature can play in beginners’ translation classes helping students to develop culturally sensitive concepts of translator role and responsibility and encouraging them to use reader-oriented translation strategies. In accordance with Functionalist Translation Theory, the translator’s ability to take into consideration culturally different perspectives is regarded as a basic component of his / her expert intercultural competence. It will be argued that students’ empathy and ability to take others’ perspectives can be fostered through source texts that enable them to connect both with the fictional world (“text world”) and the target recipient’s situation (“real world”).

Human evaluation (HE) of translation is generally considered to be valid, but it requires a lot of effort. Automatic evaluation (AE) which assesses the quality of machine translations can be done easily, but it still requires validation. This study addresses the questions of whether and how AE can be used for human translations. For this purpose AE formulas and HE criteria were compared to each other in order to examine the validity of AE. In the empirical part of the study, 120 translations were evaluated by professional translators as well as by two representative AE-systems, BLEU/ METEOR, respectively. The correlations between AE and HE were relatively high at 0.849 ** (BLEU) and 0.862 ** (METEOR) in the overall analysis, but in the ratings of the individual texts, AE and ME exhibited a substantial difference. The AE-ME correlations were often below 0.3 or even in the negative range. Ultimately, the results indicate that neither METEOR nor BLEU can be used to assess human translation at this stage. But this paper suggests three possibilities to apply AE to compromise the weakness of HE.