Terminology as a source of difficulty in translating international legal discourses: an empirical cross-genre study

Despite the persistent focus on terminology in legal translation studies, to date, no large-scale research has empirically explored the difficulty of terminology in translating legal genres. Approaches to translation difficulty in translation studies more broadly remain limited in scope. To fill this gap, a study was conducted to measure the difficulty associated with the translation of legal terminology and phraseology, as well as with terminology of other domains, in the LETRINT 1+ corpus, including nine representative genres of three institutional settings (the European Union, the United Nations and the World Trade Organization). For comparative purposes, four levels of translation difficulty were assigned to multiple terminological features by a group of specialized translators through a consensus-building process of annotation based on the cognitive effort estimated for translation decision-making. The difficulty scores obtained confirm the correlation between legal singularity and higher translation difficulty, as well as the connection of more commonly used legal terms and phrasemes, and core economic terms, with lower difficulty levels. The findings also provide evidence of the prominence of non-legal specialized terminology in institutional legal discourses, and the aggregate terminological difficulty levels of each genre examined, which can be particularly useful for informing translation quality assurance, project management and translator training.

WORDPLAY IN TV SERIES AS A TRANSLATION DIFFICULTY

В статье анализируются факторы, затрудняющие передачу игры слов при переводе в киносериалах. Киносериал рассматривается как поликодовый текст, который становится сложным контекстом функционирования игры слов. Так, к примеру, игровые приёмы могут вступать в непосредственное взаимодействие как с видеорядом, так и со звуковым оформлением кинопроизведения. The paper deals with the factors that often make wordplay in TV series virtually untranslatable. TV series being a polycode text consists not only of the verbal component but also visuals and sound. All of these create a complicated context in which wordplay is actualized. The context cannot possibly be changed and this can cause a number of difficulties.

Measuring the difficulty of text translation

This paper explores the impact of text complexity on translators’ subjective perception of translation difficulty and on their cognitive load. Twenty-six MA translation students from a UK university were asked to translate three English texts with different complexity into Chinese. Their eye movements were recorded by an eye-tracker, and their cognitive load was self-assessed with a Likert scale before translation and NASA-TLX scales after translation. The results show that: (i) the intrinsic complexity measured by readability, word frequency and non-literalness was in line with the results received from informants’ subjective assessment of translation difficulty; (ii) moderate and positive correlations existed between most items in the self-assessments and the indicator (fixation and saccade durations) obtained by the eye-tracking measurements; and (iii) the informants’ cognitive load as indicated by fixation and saccade durations (but not for pupil size) increased significantly in two of the three texts along with the increase in source text complexity.

Translation Difficulty: How to Measure and What to Measure

The present research opens up the theoretical light on measuring translation difficulty through various perspectives. However, accurate evaluation of translation difficulty by means of the level of the text, translator’s characteristics, and the quality of translation are significant for translation pedagogy and accreditation. To measure translation difficulty, one has to scrutinize it into four ways as (1) the identification of resources of translation difficulty, (2) the measurement of text readability, (3) the measurement of translation difficulty by means of translation evaluation products such as holistic, analytic, calibrated dichotomous items (CDI), and the preselected items evaluation (PIE) methods, and (4) the measurement of mental workload. This article will expand on the mentioned factors in detail in order to shed light upon translation difficulty on how and what to measure.