Volume 68, Issue 1

Ahmad Shāmlū (1925–2000), modern Persian poet, is among those creative writers who showcase their mastery of language in translation as well. Among his translated works, which encompass both verse and prose, his translation of Margot Bickel’s Pflücke den Tag (1982) and Geh deinen Weg! (1989) is specifically noteworthy for tremendous success and high reception in the TL context, which is arguably beyond that of the original from a literary and critical perspective. As the analysis of sample poems from the two collections reveals, Shāmlū’s skilful rendition has actually produced poetry in the TL. Away from marginalizing the pivotal role of translation in cross-cultural literary exchanges, this study reflects on the critique of literature in translation and literary reception as prone to downplaying or magnifying the significance of SL text in TL critical and receptive evaluations. The paper initiates with an overview of the status of literary translation and its interface with comparative literature, and then briefly reviews two world-famous works of poetry translation and their reception in host cultures to set them as the background for the argument to be made about Shāmlū’s translation of Bickel’s works.

In this article, the French translation of Schiller’s Lied von der Glocke (EN: The Song of the Bell ) is analysed. The analysis focuses on the question of how translators convey to the target language readers the specialised language of the technology of bell-founding (campanology), which is embedded in the poem. To answer this question, first the specialised vocabulary in the poem will be identified, after which the translators’ paratextual comments on the technical complexity and the specialised language will be examined. Taking the German term “Schwalch” as an example, the difficulty of conveying specialised language within a poetic context will then be discussed.

This paper investigates whether the criticisms of legal texts’ incomprehensibility are valid and justifiable. It therefore starts with determining the features of legal languages that are potentially responsible for jeopardizing the comprehensibility of legal texts. Next, it discusses the purposes (functions) these features serve in legal communication. By indicating a number of similarities between the legal and the everyday communication, the paper attempts to refute the criticisms of incomprehensibility in legal texts.

The aim of this article is to problematise the underestimation of the expert translator's competence due to the crisis of meta-narratives of legitimisation that affects experts in general and translators in particular. In the postmodern society, scientific knowledge and technical competence of experts are increasingly depreciated while the ordinary knowledge of non-specialists is experiencing an unprecedented valorisation. Given the exponential growth of the artificial intelligence techniques and the reduction of the translator's competence to the mastery of digital tools, these phenomena are amplifying and aggravating the crisis of meta-narratives, especially as regards translators. The result is imbalance in the discursive space of expertise which highlights the need to define expert competence, and – in particular – the translator's singular competence which is not exclusively linguistic. The author proposes an exhaustive analysis of the causes of the disqualification of the expert translator and suggests some ways to build a meta-narrative that would give the translator legitimacy both in terms of cognitive competence and in terms of social recognition.

This pilot study examines the hypothesis that the phonological memory of interpreters is superior to that of non-interpreters when embedded in a context. Context-embedded phonological memory (CEPM) is a product of the interaction between semantic and phonological memory, and becomes a component of interpreters’ professional expertise because of their attentional control. Four groups with different years of interpretation experience were asked to recall texts with distinct CEPM features. CEPM and its retrieval process were measured using WordSmith 6.0 and My Screen Recorder. Professional interpreters retrieved a high amount of CEPM (39.6 %), but were outperformed by interpreter trainees (40.52 %), roughly 15 years younger on average. Group difference was statistically significant only between the groups with interpretation experience and the teacher group. Only professionals’ performance in retrieving highly abstract information and the proper names and numbers in a context suggests that professionals are skilled at exploiting phonological information to create an elaborate semantic network.

The present study aims to compare and contrast the websites of international non-government organizations (INGOs) that make their websites available in Jordan in both Arabic and English with the purpose of identifying the content that does or does not get localised. The researchers selected the website of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) as a case study. The English version of the IFRC website is meticulously set off against its Arabic counterpart. This study draws on Olvera-Lobo and Castillo-Rodríguez’s (2019) suggested framework with regards to the linguistic and cultural aspects of localised websites. The study concludes that the recommendations related to linguistic and cultural aspects of website localisation presented by Olvera-Lobo and Castillo-Rodríguez (2019) have proven to be valuable in assessing the localised versions of INGOs as they cover a wide range of facets needed by the target readerships.