The effects of topic familiarity on information completeness, fluency, and target language quality of student interpreters in Chinese–English consecutive interpreting

This study investigated the effects of topic familiarity on interpreting quality of eighteen Master of Translation and Interpreting (MTI) student interpreters in Chinese–English consecutive interpreting (CI) at a university in China. Data were collected from two interpreting tasks in a 2-hour interpreting course over a four-week period. The interpreting quality was assessed by using three analytic rating scales (i.e., information completeness, fluency of delivery, and target language quality) and a holistic rating. Semi-structured interviews with the students were conducted to gain some in-depth perceptions of the effects of topic familiarity on interpreting quality. The results showed that topic familiarity had significant effects on information completeness, fluency of delivery, target language quality, and holistic scores of the interpreting tasks. It was also found that topic familiarity strongly correlated with information completeness, fluency of delivery, target language quality, and holistic scores. The findings of the study indicate that topic familiarity should be included and highlighted in Chinese–English consecutive interpreting in classroom contexts. The study provides effective guidance for interpreting teaching, training, and research.

Translation skills required by Master’s graduates for employment: Which are needed, which are not?

There is ongoing debate about which skills translation students require for employment. Numerous “bridge the gap” studies draw on translation professionals in order to list the skills that graduates should have acquired. However, many of the available surveys indicate, with some regularity, that only a minority of graduates from Master’s programs in translation actually find stable employment in the translation industry. Here we report on a survey of graduates from the University of Melbourne and the skills that they say they require once in employment. The graduates who are employed in the translation industry prioritize skills that are significantly different from those prioritized by graduates employed in other sectors. This raises an underlying question of whether we are training for an industry or for society.

Broadening the scope of error categories in translation assessment through screen recording

To date, the assessment of student translations has been largely based on configurations of error categories that address some facet of the translation product. Focal points of such product-oriented error annotation include language mechanics (punctuation, grammar, lexis and syntax, for example) and various kinds of transfer errors. In recent years, screen recording technology has opened new doors for empirically informing translation assessment from a more process-oriented perspective (Massey and Ehrensberger-Dow, 2014; Angelone, 2019). Screen recording holds particular promise when tracing errors documented in the product back to potential underlying triggers in the form of processes that co-occur on screen in their presence. Assessor observations made during screen recording analysis can give shape to process-oriented error categories that parallel and complement product-oriented categories. This paper proposes a series of empirically informed, process-oriented error categories that can be used for assessing translations in contexts where screen recordings are applied as a diagnostic tool. The categories are based on lexical and semantic patterns derived from a corpus-based analysis of think-aloud protocols documenting articulations made by assessors when commenting on errors made in student translations while watching screen recordings of their work. It is hoped that these process-oriented error categories will contribute to a more robust means by which to assess and classify errors in translation.

Coping with syntactic complexity in English–Chinese sight translation by translation and interpreting students.

This study approaches syntactic complexity from a relative point of view and examines how translation and interpreting students cope with relative clauses and passive constructions, two exemplifications of syntactic complexity in English–Chinese sight translation. A group of students (N = 23) took part in the study. The study consisted of three parts: an English reading span test, a sight translation task, and a baseline reading task. During the sight translation task, the participants sight translated English sentences with different degrees of structural asymmetry into Chinese in the single sentence context and the discourse context. During the baseline reading task, they silently read the English sentences and answered the comprehension questions. The participants' eye movements in the sight translation and baseline reading tasks were recorded as indicators of cognitive load. Three major findings were generated: (1) Syntactic complexity resulted in a significant increase in cognitive load during the sight translation task. The syntactic aspects of the target language were activated during the initial stage of comprehension, which favoured the parallel view of translation. (2) Although sight translation became more time efficient due to wider contexts, a larger amount of contextual information did not make word-based processing less effortful, as indicated by more fixations and the longer regression path duration in the discourse context. (3) No correlations were found between reading span and cognitive load in addressing syntactical complexity.

A syntactic complexity analysis of translational English across genres

This study compares the syntactic complexity between translational and non-translational English across four genres (i.e. fiction, news, general prose, and academic prose) and examines the connections between various forms and degrees of syntactic complexity measures and explicitation. Fourteen syntactic complexity indices were examined based on a one-million-word translational English corpus (COTE) and a one-million-word non-translational English corpus (i.e. FLOB), respectively. This study shows that syntactic explicitation in translations varies with the formality of discourse. The most significant complexity difference between translational vis-à-vis non-translational English is found in fiction, which is regarded as the major contributor to translational English syntactic complexity. No significant difference in syntactic complexity was observed between the two types of academic English texts. Translational English news and general prose stand between fiction and academic texts. Translational fiction and news are characterised by more phrasal complexity features such as coordinate and complex nominal phrases, and a key indicator of translational English general prose complexity is subordination. The findings of this study will help students of translation to make informed decisions on the arrangement of sentence structures when given texts of different genres.

Sovietisms as cultural, social and historical realia in English retranslations of Bulgakov's The Fatal Eggs

Mikhail Bulgakov's fantastic short story The Fatal Eggs (1925) was translated into English by five translators, Mirra Ginsburg (1964), Kathleen Gook-Horujy (1990), Hugh Aplin (2003), Michael Karpelson (2010), and Roger Cockrell (2011). The emphasis in this research is on the linguistic analysis of the translations of cultural, social and historical realia referred to as Sovietisms, which pertain to items characteristic of Soviet discourse in the 1930s. Bulgakov's language is brimming with Soviet vocabulary that refers to various cultural and socio-political elements of Soviet reality. A complete naturalization or even omission of Sovietisms may lead to loss of connotative meanings essential to understanding the context, while foreignizing through transliteration or calquing may disturb the fluency of reading. The purpose of the analysis is to assess the translators' choices and what they imply for the readers. Another aim is to test the assumptions of re-translation theory (Bensimon 1990; Gambier 1994), which states that early translations are more target-oriented than subsequent translations. The analysis employs taxonomies suggested by Vlakhov and Florin (1980) and Mokienko and Nikitina (1998) for the classification of Sovietisms, and Aixelá’s taxonomy of translation strategies (1996) as the grounds for the case study.