The constraints in the field of institutional translation in Turkey

This paper aims to examine the constraints in the institutional field within the framework of the sociology of translation. In the paper, the term “constraint” refers to the problems that cannot be solved due to many factors and negatively affect the translation process, translators, and therefore translation product. The paper will reveal all the constraints with an analysis of the position of the field within the field of power, the structure of the field, and the habitus of agents (here exclusively referring to translators), based on Pierre Bourdieu’s model of field analysis. The study draws on the case studies of four institutions to analyze all the dynamics of the institutional field and their impact on the translation process and translation product. The institutions are the European Union Translation Coordination Presidency (EUTCP) and the Prime Ministry Directorate General of Press and Information (PDGPI) as a national institution, the United Nations World Food Program (WFP) as an international institution, and the Association of Solidarity with Asylum Seekers and Immigrants (ASAM) as a non-governmental organization. Face-to-face interviews with these four institutions, which carry out different translation activities for different purposes, will reveal the big picture of the field. However, more empirical work is needed to generalize about the constraints of this field.

Reframing an author’s image through the style of translation

This paper seeks to explore how the style of translation reframes an author’s changing image. In light of the transformation of Latife Tekin from being considered an author of the poor and dispossessed with whom she identifies to being acknowledged as a translator who channels the marginal world of the dispossessed people into the mainstream, as evidenced in various paratextual and metatextual discourses in Turkey, the study focuses on the style of the English translation of Tekin’s Buzdan Kılıçlar (Swords of Ice). The study underlines that an author’s ontological narrative, which feeds into his or her image, may impact the style of the translation of his or her work. Noting that the style of translation may serve as a way of responding to an author’s ontological narrative, the study highlights that the stylistic features (i.e., italics and quotation marks) added to the translation of Buzdan Kılıçlar appear to be in interplay with the narratives that prepared the ground for Tekin’s self-identification as a translator. Ultimately, the study points out that those stylistic features foreground not only the cultural other against Turkey’s modern and secular establishment but also the Oriental other against Western modernity.

Translating in a constrained environment

Translating children’s literature has been an object of interest researched from a number of vantage points, including the question of constraining factors. Scholars have highlighted mainly the question of dual readership or cultural adaptation, frequently without a global and systemic analysis of all impediments. This article examines the Polish translation of the German book for children, Katharina von der Gathen’s Klär mich auf, from a constraint-based framework. This article focuses on the reconstruction of the constraints in the translation process: the point of departure is the framework with three basic factors that constrain translation, i.e., the intention of the author/translator, text type, and the profile of the audience. The presented argumentation incorporates other formal impediments, such as the visual layer of the book and the semiotic make-up of the source text, language taboo and censorship or the literary polysystems. The analysis of the constraint framework helps to comprehend the translation in terms of the ST-TT relationship regarding their intended audiences, genre-related features, and the child-adult duality.

Revisiting translation in the age of digital globalization

Globalization has gone digital and presents a new type of connectivity virtually today. Digital globalization has transformed the landscape of translation theory and practice, exerting considerable influence on translation studies and the profession of translators. The translation practice evolves with the change of literary expectations driven by the digital revolution. New translation modes have been cultivated by incorporating two essential features of the age, known as technology and participation. Against this backdrop, Chinese web fiction is going global with establishing and developing overseas volunteer translation websites. With this in mind, this paper analyzes the translation model of Chinese web fiction with respect to digital globalization and argues that the fan-based volunteer translation has emerged as a new paradigm that features the “user participation turn” in translation studies.

“Even more Reuters than Reuters”?

Blogs play an important role in every aspect of our cultural and social life. There has been a lot of research on blogs but very little research on blog translation. Blog translation may refer to translation of articles or comments posted in blogs or any translation done at weblogs. Different from other types of translators, blogger translators are no longer in the bondage to the traditional patrons and professionals as, in addition to the role of a writer/translator, bloggers can take on two other roles at the same time, namely a publisher (a patron) and a reviewer (a professional). This article makes a case study on the quality of Roland Soong’s translation in his famous blog entitled EastSouthWestNorth (ESWN). The finding in this research justifies to some extent the value of blog translation and also the importance of further research on blog translation as well as influential blogger translators.

“Twice Bitten”

In the 1995 preface to Translators through History (Delisle and Woodsworth, 1995), Jean-François Joly, President of the International Federation of Translators, quotes a line by Antoine Berman: “The construction of a history of translation is the first task of a modern theory of translation” (Berman 1992, 1). He elaborates as follows: “Constructing a history of translation means bringing to light the complex network of cultural exchanges between people, cultures and civilizations through the ages. It means drawing a portrait of these import-export workers and attempting to unravel their deep-rooted reasons for translating one particular work instead of another. It means finding out why their sponsors (kings, aristocrats, patrons, high-ranking clergy, etc.) asked them to translate a given work. It means taking into account what the translators themselves have written about their work, its difficulties and constraints.” This paper, as the title suggests, attempts to draw a portrait, based on the documents and letters1 exchanged by the translators themselves, of the collaboration between two translators working on one translation, the Hawkes-Minford Story of the Stone, otherwise known as The Dream of the Red Chamber. The true and complete story can never be known by outsiders, like us, the readers. But through this paper, we can “hear” and “read” the voices of the translators, the publisher and other informants. Let history speak.

Translating official documents from French to English in Uganda

Although underexplored in Africa, the translation of official documents presents a revelatory context for examining translation practice and theory. Through a sociolinguistic and pragmatic lens, this study explores how translating official documents by focusing on linguistic equivalences without taking into account national institutional systems can be misleading. The argument is made that sociolinguistic variables and Grice’s pragmatic maxims are essential in enhancing translation effectiveness. A sample of 151 pairs of source and target documents dating from 2011–2017 was purposively selected. This corpus from nineteen Francophone countries covers three broad categories: Education, Legal, and General Administrative Correspondence. Nineteen translators and fourteen end-users were also interviewed regarding the translation effectiveness of corpus examples. Data is analyzed using sociolinguistic and pragmatic criteria. Finally, the analysis is positioned within the broader scholarship on translation studies to demonstrate how this approach expands our knowledge regarding effective translation.

A topic modeling analysis of Korea’s T&I research trends in the 2010s

The present study aims to demonstrate the relevance of topic modeling as a new research tool for analyzing research trends in the T&I field. Until now, most efforts to this end have relied on manual classification based on pre-established typologies. This method is time- and labor-consuming, prone to subjective biases, and limited in describing a vast amount of research output. As a key component of text mining, topic modeling offers an efficient way of summarizing topic structure and trends over time in a collection of documents while being able to describe the entire system without having to rely on sampling. As a case study, the present paper applies the technique to analyzing a collection of abstracts from four Korean Language T&I journals for the 2010s decade (from 2010 to 2019). The analysis proves the technique to be highly successful in uncovering hidden topical structure and trends in the abstract corpus. The results are discussed along with implications of the technique for the T&I field.