Time pressure in translation

Translators may experience significant psychological and physiological responses to time pressure. This study examines such responses with the aim of identifying valid indicators of time pressure in written translation. Forty-five postgraduates participated in the study, translating three comparable English texts into Chinese under three time conditions (Short, Standard, and Free). A positive relation between time stringency and the arousal level detected by a set of self-reporting and biomarker measures was hypothesised. The hypothesis was corroborated by results derived from participants’ self-reporting on stress and anxiety, and the biomarkers of heart rate, blood pressure, and pupil dilation, but not by skin temperature, galvanic skin response (GSR), and heart rate variability (HRV). Thus, the measures that confirm the hypothesis are considered successful indicators of time pressure in translation. In addition, an inverted ‘U-shaped’ pattern was observed in the relation between time stringency and the arousal level indexed by GSR and HRV. These findings may facilitate research and training in translation and other cognitively demanding language-processing activities.

Paradoxes of translation

In this article, I consider what is assumed to be the speculative paradox of translation: that translation is theoretically impossible but actually practicable. My thesis is that this aporia is nothing but a consequence of the limited way in which translation is often conceptualised. In this article, the term ‘translation’ is to be understood as interlingual translation, unless otherwise indicated; more precisely, as literary translation. In order to present my argument, I will examine three examples of translation, namely: (1) the fictionalisation of the translation process in Nicole Brossard’s novel Le désert mauve; (2) Jean-François Billeter’s translation of a poem by the medieval Chinese poet Su Dongpo; and (3) the translation of the words ‘tragedy’ and ‘comedy’ by the fictional character Averroes in a short story written by Jorge Louis Borges. The analysis of these real or fictitious examples of translation will help to introduce the notion of the unspoken as that which cannot be transmuted or recognised as a sign. This ever-present dimension of the translation process will allow me to show that the thesis of fundamental untranslatability is a false aporia, which derives from a reductive understanding of the phenomenon of translation.

Appearances

This article re-evaluates the theoretical import of networks of signification, one of Antoine Berman’s twelve deforming tendencies in translation. Taking Jane Eyre as a case study, the article considers character description as an example of a Bermanian network and traces the physical appearance of the novel’s characters across its six Russian translations. Character description represents a network that is traceable, depends on the reader’s ability to construct a visual mental image over the course of a narrative, has a tangible impact on characterisation, and remains relevant throughout a novel. It thus offers a concrete illustration of the relevance of networks of signification as a model for the systemic interpretative potential of translation variation. This analysis paves the way for further study of Bermanian networks and the ultimate integration of this concept in translation practice.

The impact of text presentation on translator performance

Widely used computer-aided translation (CAT) tools divide documents into segments, such as sentences, and arrange them side-by-side in a spreadsheet-like view. We present the first controlled evaluation of these design choices on translator performance, measuring speed and accuracy in three experimental text-processing tasks. We find significant evidence that sentence-by-sentence presentation enables faster text reproduction and within-sentence error identification compared to unsegmented text, and that a top-and-bottom arrangement of source and target sentences enables faster text reproduction compared to a side-by-side arrangement. For revision, on the other hand, we find that presenting unsegmented text results in the highest accuracy and time efficiency. Our findings have direct implications for best practices in designing CAT tools.

Prefaces in Soviet translations of Robert Burns’s poetry as ideological tools

This article focuses on the ideological content and function of the prefaces that accompany the translations of foreign literature made in the Soviet Union. The aim of the article is to demonstrate how these translations use paratexts to comply with the target system’s ideological constraints. It shows how the ways in which the Soviet authorities used paratexts to manipulate representations of the author of the source text and the text itself reflect the power structures within the target system. The empirical investigation draws on a close lexical analysis of ideologemes in two prefaces that accompanied Soviet translations of Robert Burns’s poetry.

A methodology of translatological and sociological cooperation in data collection, analysis, and interpretation

The aim of this study is to present a methodology of joint translatological–sociological cooperation in data collection, analysis, and interpretation to study translation strategies and norms. In order to identify norms, research cannot be restricted to translations: it is imperative to include translators and their practice as well. Thus, key research methods drawn on in this study are textual analyses and semi-structured interviews. The use of these two methods allows for the merging of the observable results of translation practice with translators’ social contextualisation and their reflection on practice (doxa). This method aims to answer the following questions: How do translators translate? Why do they translate the way they do? What do they really do when translating?

Can a corpus-driven lexical analysis of human and machine translation unveil discourse features that set them apart?

There is still much to learn about the ways in which human and machine translation differ with regard to the contexts that regulate the production and interpretation of discourse. The present study explores whether a corpus-driven lexical analysis of human and machine translation can unveil discourse features that set the two apart. A balanced corpus of source texts aligned with authentic, professional translations and neural machine translations was compiled for the study. Lexical discrepancies in the two translation corpora were then extracted via a corpus-driven keyword analysis, and examined qualitatively through parallel concordances of source texts aligned with human and machine translation. The study shows that keyword analysis not only reiterates known problems of discourse in machine translation such as lexical inconsistency and pronoun resolution, but can also provide valuable insights regarding contextual aspects of translated discourse deserving further research.

The translation of extralinguistic cultural references in subtitling

There has been substantial scholarly interest in extralinguistic cultural references (ECRs) in translation, especially in audiovisual translation (AVT). However, most scholars have investigated subtitling from English into other languages. Although China has a long tradition of film production, few studies have investigated the subtitling of ECRs from Chinese into English. This article attempts to remedy this by investigating the translation strategies, translation strategy distribution, and fidelity indexes of six subtitled versions of Chinese-language films. We compare our results with Gottlieb’s (2009) results on Danish subtitles, and find that both Chinese and Danish subtitlers hold a target-oriented attitude. We then investigate the share of the strategies in the subtitling of ECRs across different Chinese films and determine that this varies by genre and that the difference in the fidelity index among films of different genres is substantial. The translation of epic films appears to be highly faithful, whereas that of crime and gangster films is much less faithful.