Volume 67, Issue 1

The aim of this article is to analyze in detail the concepts underlying the digital techniques of artificial intelligence currently used in various fields, including translation. Based on this analysis, the epistemological limits of these techniques are examined, especially those resulting from the difficulty of modeling mechanisms of human rationality such as abduction or selection.In addition, the article explores the risks induced by the mass use of these techniques in translation, including their nature, extent and effects, and illustrates them with practical examples.

Two experiments were conducted to investigate the effects of visual segmentation, complexity, and context on the cognitive processing of compounds in Easy Language. By presenting compounds in different boundary conditions, we determined whether a segmentation cue facilitates the processing of compounds presented with and without contextual information. The study was conducted with unimpaired adults and with hearing-impaired pupils, representing one of the Easy Language target groups. The results indicate that visual segmentation facilitates processing of compounds for pupils with low literacy skills. However, they only benefit from segmentation when morpheme boundaries are marked in a subtle way, i. e., without strikingly deviating from the standard version. Pupils with higher literacy skills and unimpaired adults do not profit from segmentation. Even though hyphenation slows down compound processing for unimpaired readers, initial processing advantages of hyphenated over concatenated compounds emerged, which is explained by the fact that hyphenation forces a morpheme-based access and enables fast recognition of the compound’s first constituent. However, it hinders readers from accessing the compound via the direct route and thus slows down the processing of the compound as a whole.

This article presents a fairly random selection of problems encountered over many years in dealing with Bible translations in languages of very diverse families in various distant lands. These include Russia, Thailand, Cambodia, Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islands. The issues discussed relate to natural phenomena such as landscape and seasons, flora and fauna, and also pronoun nuances, personal names and other aspects of social relations, as well as figurative language and idioms.

Nominalkomposita , which are nouns and adjectives formed by the fusion of two or more vernacular words, are a frequent terminological component of German texts. This paper analyses in depth, resorting to examples taken from the author’s experience as a scientific translator and as a translation instructor, the main problems involved in the translation into Spanish and Portuguese of Nominalkomposita occurring in German texts aimed at science education and popularization. Those translation problems can be grouped into two categories, one of a general nature, deriving from the fact that many of those compound words have a non-additive translation, and even a non-additive denotation, and the other of a special nature, which consists in the existence of 1:2 or 1:3 equivalence relations that stem both from the combination of polysemy in the source language with monosemy in the target language, and from a lack of denotative specificity in some Nominalkomposita making up terminological doublets, thus giving rise to concept inclusion in translation.

English is the source of many of the colloquial, unofficial names we use for towns, cities, regions and the like in Spain today. Yet, due to the special (some might even say marginal) linguistic status of proper names and the ever-changing, fluid nature of informal Spanish, the importance and extent of this particular kind of influence of English on the Spanish lexicon have gone unnoticed in studies on Anglicisms. Based on a corpus of European Spanish tweets containing colloquial alternatives for traditional place names, this article examines some two hundred unconventional toponyms borrowed from or somehow inspired by English. Not surprisingly, only a few of these toponyms qualify as genuine Anglicisms. Most are faux-English pronunciations, spellings or names translated, often quite badly, from Spanish. The inherent oddity and humour of these loanwords, be they authentic or faux, hinge on an incongruity between their anglicised forms and the cultural affiliation of their referents and serve to create a sense of social closeness between participants in conversation.

Resumen En este trabajo, mostramos los resultados de un estudio empírico en el que los estudiantes de la asignatura Traducción Intercultural se enfrentan a un texto político en sus respectivas lenguas B (inglés o francés) en el que han de trasvasar el contenido semántico y formal al español y respetar las características de naturaleza retórica, las cuales pueden suponer grandes retos traductológicos. Utilizando como metodología las aportaciones de Van Dijk (1997), Schäffner y Wiesemann (2001) y la competencia traductora (Kelly 2002), llevamos a cabo una propuesta didáctica basada en cuestionarios para demostrar que el Análisis del Discurso es imprescindible en la fase pretraductora del encargo.