Volume 69, Issue 2

This essay proposes to show how translation plurality, i. e. the existence of several translations of the same original, ensures the translation’s and the translator’s visibility. The starting point is Venuti’s concepts of ‘fluent translation’ or the ‘transparency’ of translation, coined for English-language translation practice between 1700 and today, and his – centuries old – distinction between domestication and foreignization. On the basis of Melchiorre Cesarotti’s project of a double Italian translation of the Iliad and, in particular, his theoretical reflections on translation, it is argued that translation plurality is one way to overcome the notion of only one fluent and transparent leading translation that is criticized by Venuti. The essay concludes with some remarks on building awareness of multiple translations, and on elaborating a general discourse of translation plurality.

This article analyses the peculiar writing processes of Tomer Gardi in his novel Broken German as a broken mediality . Through the interaction of theoretical tools proper to Media Studies with perspectives of so-called Betroffenheitsliteratur and postcolonial theory, I claim that the novel can be seen as example of how the affection ( Betroffenheit ) of migrants facing discrimination due to their broken language can be not only picked out as a central theme of postmigrant narrations, but also performed through the medium itself. Here, through its own body , language actually becomes capable of performing what it is talking about. My reasoning starts from Dewey’s reflections on the role of medium in the aesthetic experience, from the concepts of Automedialität and Mikropolitik der Betroffenheit, as theorized by Jörg Dünne, Christian Moser and Andrea Seier, researching how individual and collective subjectivities are constituted through their cultural, linguistic and medial genealogies, in the wake of theorists like Foucault, Deleuze, Derrida, Butler and Spivak.I argue that Gardi’s case shows that the dynamic constitution of the writing subject always implicates a radical and violent transformation of the medium, in a process of mutual breaking and becoming-each-other.

Depending on whether translation leans toward objective rendering or subjective interpretation it will have different truth-functions. This essay reflects on the issues of truth-function at stake on both sides of the “hosting” language (translation) when seeking to understand “otherness” (original language). The essay will draw from particular examples of translation of Chinese thought such as the literal renderings of the Classics in Western languages, Li Zehou’s concept of “subjectality” ( zhutixing 主體性) and François Jullien’s Western-inverted “deconstruction”. The point here is not to establish validity in translation, but to describe what are the cognitive and ethical implications when understanding and performing translation – a relational description thus presented as precondition for the possibility of translation-as-dialogue.

The question if the January 6, 2021, events at the US Capitol were an insurrection, a protest or something in between, is highly contentious, and the words someone uses to refer to those events may reveal a great deal about their political stances. The present paper performs a corpus-linguistic analysis in order to investigate how the two major US news outlets CNN and Fox News reported on the January 6 events. The corpus contains 633 articles from CNN and 847 from Fox News, all of which were written over a time span of 10 months, starting on January 6, 2021. The corpus analysis is preceded by a detailed analysis of each outlet’s position on the political spectrum and their respective audiences, both based on statistics from independent polling organizations.

This paper examines how different gender identities are treated in the audio description feature provided on the Netflix platform. It examines how gender is reflected in language through the use of gendered terms and pronouns and how these are determined and assigned. The paper analyses if gender is assigned based on the visual information provided or if extra resources are used to confirm the validity of the descriptions. A set of Netflix movies and series with diverse casts were thus examined to compare how gender is treated in descriptions. The analysis searches for the existence of bias and assumptions and how they affect the description and described groups. The findings revealed that basing descriptions on visuals creates confusion between gender expression, performance, and gender identity, which could lead to the misgendering of both cisgender and transgender characters. Thus, it is best not to rely on stereotypes and assumptions and to research the characters through textual and extratextual information to properly describe them. Examining the uses of gender-neutral and gender-fair language in contrast with gendered labels revealed that it can be used to avoid misgendering but is currently mainly used as a tool to enhance mystery.

This study investigates the relevance of including the translation of non-verbal elements in film subtitles. It suggests that non-verbal elements play a crucial role in understanding films and, consequently, need to be considered when translating: what is non-verbal becomes written in the translation, carrying a significant semantic load. The article presents an empirical study adopting a qualitative approach that aims to explore and analyse the effect of including non-verbal translation in film subtitles, particularly in a Lebanese movie titled The Insult, subtitled in French. The results show that non-verbal communication and its semantic value should be explicit in subtitling to the foreign-language audience, whether explicitly apparent, graphically represented, or implicitly present between words and lines.

The Canary Islands have traditionally been known for their beautiful beaches and tourist resorts. However, in the last decades, African migrant reception in this territory has become a human rights issue, which requires attention from all those involved in providing infrastructure, medical assistance, integration opportunities, etc. At the base of any of these actions is communication. Assisting migrants as soon as they arrive in Spanish territory, is certainly a new context where both language and cultural barriers are present.In this article we aim to describe the characteristics of the so-called Atlantic route in the context of irregular migration by sea, with a view to justifying its designation as a humanitarian crisis context and the consequent need to address this situation by providing suitable interpreter training for both ad hoc interpreters and those involved in interpreter education. We will also describe the main differences in the role played by interpreters and cultural mediators, with a special focus on ethical principles attached to the interpreting profession. Finally, after presenting some of the challenges in current communication practices with people arriving on the coasts of the Canary Islands, we will discuss whether translation and interpreting services should adapt to this specific situation.

Resumen El presente artículo, que se inscribe en el marco del Proyecto de Investigación “La retroalimentación formativa en la enseñanza-aprendizaje de la traducción” (Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación, PID2020-113236GB-I00), tiene como objetivo poner de manifiesto la pertinencia de la utilización de la pregunta como método de retroalimentación escrita en la evaluación de encargos de traducción en las asignaturas de traducción jurídica del Grado en Traducción e Interpretación de la Universidad de Málaga, en consonancia con la premisa socrática. El recurso a este mecanismo didáctico permite que, en un primer momento, el discente reflexione de forma más profunda sobre sus errores para, a continuación, entablar un diálogo con el evaluador que le posibilite alcanzar, de forma autónoma, una solución correcta que subsane dichas incorrecciones. Se trata, en suma, de fomentar un doble proceso correctivo que redunde en la calidad de las traducciones del alumnado. Para ello, partiremos, por un lado, de un corpus de traducciones (francés-español) corregidas y evaluadas por docentes de traducción jurídica, y, por otra, de la opinión de los alumnos sobre este mecanismo evaluativo expresada en una serie de cuestionarios confeccionados ad hoc .

Lung cancer is associated to high mortality rates and has a large impact on the quality of life of patients and families, who therefore need suitable information to deal with the situation. However, information provided by health services is often not adapted to lay users and retains a considerable number of technicalities that impair comprehensibility. Accessibility, a concept receiving increasing attention, not only involves physical access but also understanding relevant information when it comes to the medical setting. One of the main intralingual translation procedures used to adapt specialised text is determinologisation, which comprises strategies like using common-speech synonyms, explanations, examples, etc. Recent artificial intelligence generative models offer a promising tool to produce texts at different specialisation levels. In this study, we evaluated the capacity of ChatGPT for determinologisation of terms extracted from a corpus of patient-oriented lung-cancer texts and compared the results with reliable patient-oriented online sources. ChatGPT produced definitions and context information similar to those of the online sources in a very short amount of time. However, both the choice of suitable input prompts and the post-edition process necessary to produce quality final texts on lung-cancer information still required the supervision of human experts.

Albeit controversial, human-machine parity in neural machine translation has been claimed, but there is a lack of empirical studies providing concrete evidence. This article aims to present part of the results of an experiment conducted under the NEUROTRAD project where human-machine parity in neural machine translation is approached from the perspective of post-editing effort. Combining descriptive statistics, Friedman test for hypothesis testing, and Spearman correlation coefficients, our study analyses the answers to two questionnaires by 36 Spanish freelance translators in order to test 1) whether the type of translation —human, machine translation, and, as a novelty, post-edited machine translation— impacts on the perceived post-editing effort, time, and quality and 2) whether the participant’s professional experience correlates with the perceived post-editing effort, time, and quality. Results revealed that, on the one hand, the type of translation has no influence on the perceived post-editing effort (p<0.953), time (p<0.439) and quality (p<0.390) and, on the other hand, having more post-editing experience does not correlate with 1) perceived post-editing effort for post-edited machine translation (p<0.094); 2) perceived post-editing time for human translation (p<0.259) and post-edited machine translation (p<0.187) and 3) perceived translation quality for post-edited machine translation (p<0.10).

Zusammenfassung In diesem Artikel wird die Förderung der lexikalischen Präzision im Fremdsprachenunterricht Deutsch innerhalb des Bachelorstudiums Übersetzen und Dolmetschen unter dem Prisma der Zielorientiertheit ins Auge gefasst. Zunächst wird bestrebt, klare Linien zum herkömmlichen Fremdsprachenunterricht zu ziehen. Mittels der Einbeziehung des Fragenkatalogs von Nation (2020) und unterschiedlicher translatorischer Subkompetenzen (vgl. u. a. Kelly 2002) sowie der systematischen Anwendung digitaler Ressourcen und KI wird versucht, die lexikalische Präzision zu schulen. Wir erarbeiten spezifische Lerninhalte innerhalb des zielorientierten Fremdsprachenunterrichts für Translatoren, in denen die Lernziele genau angegeben werden. Die Verfolgung derselben wird Schritt für Schritt aufgeschlüsselt, um zu einem Gesamtbild zu gelangen. Diese Vorgehensweise kann als Modell fungieren, denn sie lässt sich an andere Lerninhalte im Zuge des zielsprachlichen Fremdsprachenunterrichts für Studierende des Translationsstudienganges anpassen.