1,721,065 research outputs found
Occupation or profession: a survey of the translators' world
No full textThe main aim of this paper is to report on an online questionnaire which focused on translator and interpreter perception of their working world, their mindset or weltanshaung, and the impact of Translation studies and university training on that world.
Though translation has been practiced for millennia (Chesterman and Wagner 2002, Palumbo 2009: 1), and is possibly the “second oldest profession” (Baer and Koby 2003: viii), “the academicization” (Baker 2008: xiv) of the practice only began within living memory. And with academicization has come the (academic) view that the practitioners no longer ply a trade as “secondary, mechanical scribe[s]”, but that they are “crosscultural professional[s]” thanks to the revolution of the functionalist theory (Gentzler 2001: 71). They are now “highly professional translators who belong to the same ‘world’ as their clients, who are focused on professionalism and making a good living, and who are highly trained...” (Baker and Chesterman (2008: 22).
Mona Baker’s comment, above, is actually part of a narrative which exhorts translators to go beyond mere professionalism and to take responsibility for the fact that “Intervention is inherent in the act of translation and interpreting” (ibid: 16).
There are also a number of dissenting voices, which either point to the academic distance from reality (e.g. Milton 2001), to a trend towards deprofessionalisation (e.g. Pym 2005), to the translator’s ‘voluntary servitude’ (Simione 1998: 23), to quality downturn due to lowest-bid market economics (e.g. Muzii 2006) or to the competition from IT (e.g. Biau Gil and Pym 2006). Also, while Sela-Sheffey (2008: 2) laments the lack of research or findings regarding translator status, she does suggest that “all evidence shows that they are usually regarded as minor, auxiliary manpower”
From Cassandra to Pandora - Thoughts on Translation and Transformation in a multilingual and multicultural future. A conversation with FIT Immediate Past President, Dr. Henry Liu
No full textCritical interview between FIT Past president and the author (David Katan) regarding FIT, the translation profession and the future
Translating Cultures: An Introduction for Translators, Interpreters and Mediators
No full text‘Translating across cultures’ and ‘cultural proficiency’ have become buzz words in translating and interpreting. Mona Baker (1996:17) warns that many scholars have now adopted a “‘cultural’ perspective ... a dangerously fashionable word that almost substitutes for rigour and coherence”. As the 21st century gets into stride, so does the call for a discipline combining culture and translation. In 2001, the CIUTI Conférence Internationale d’instituts Universitaires de traducteurs et interprêtes opened its Colloquium with “Kooperationskonzepte für die multilinguale Gesellschafte” rather than on the word, the text and equivalence. The plenary sessions all focussed on transcultural communication and mediation. In 2004, the first international conference on “Translation and Intercultural Communication” was held, a landmark, at least in talk.
The aim of this book is to put some rigour and coherence into this fashionable word, and in doing so unravel the ‘X’ factor involved in teaching culture to translators, interpreters and other mediators. It is an introduction to current understanding about culture and its importance in communication, translation and interpretation. As such, it aims to bridge the culture-gap inherent in books or courses focusing on either translation theory and practice, language or ‘institutions’. More importantly, in clarifying the ‘X’ factor, it aims to raise awareness of the role of culture in constructing, perceiving and translating reality.
This book should serve as a framework for interpreters and translators (both actual and potential) working between English and any other language, and also for those working or living between these cultures who wish to understand more about their cross-cultural successes and frustrations.
The book is divided into four main parts:
Part 1: Framing Culture: The Culture-Bound Mental Map of the World.
Part 2: Shifting Frames: Translation and Mediation in Theory and Practice.
Part 3: The Array of Frames: Communication Orientations.
Part 4: Intercultural Competence: On becoming a Cultural Interpreter/Mediato
Cueing the picture: contexts and strategies in translating dialect poetry from the Carnic Alps
No full textDialect poetry, Translation theory, Friulia
Mediating the Point of Refraction and Playing with the Perlocutionary Effect: A Translator’s Choice?
Get PDFCultural studies and translation studies have traditionally trodden separate paths, though both have been fundamentally concerned with the processes of communication and meaning. To a large extent the former has viewed translation as a necessary but unimportant vehicle (and necessary only because many cultural studies scholars are foreign), while those involved in translation have tended to assume that culture, and the study of it, has little to do with the art of translating a text. As we shall see, though, times are changing.
This paper takes as its starting point that language is one of four filters affecting perception of reality, the other three being physiological, individual and socio-cultural (Katan 1999a: 88-90). It is, as Hanks notes (1993: 139) “one of the central vehicles of habitus”. I will refer to habitus as Simeoni does, as a “convenient stenograph for different default functions applying at different levels and in different domains” (1998: 17), a global catch-all for context of situation, map of the world and context of culture (see Katan 1999a: 71-74). It is, according to Bourdieu: “a system of durable, transposable dispositions”, of “internalised structures, common schemes of perception, conception and action”, the result of inculcation and habituation, simultaneously structured and structuring, and directed towards practice (1990: 53- 60).
Language re-presents a person’s particular vision of reality for the benefit of others. Barthes (1993: 109) calls this socially constructed representation a “myth”, suggesting that “everything can be a myth provided it is conveyed by a discourse”. This is a useful metaphor to bear in mind. Myths do not exist in the objective reality, but are parables or allegories with an array of possible significations. The reader, in interpreting the succession of words as coherent discourse (locutions or signifiers) will give the words meaning, and experience a certain effect, known in speech act theory as the perlocutionary effect.
Speech act theory deals principally with three levels of language and meaning, each of which anyone interested in communication should be aware of. The locution and the locutionary meaning, according to J. L. Austin (1962), is the dictionary or referential meaning. However, what is important in communication, both for culture studies and for translation studies is the force of the locution (the illocutionary force), which will be related to the interlocutor’s intention, and the way in which the locution affects the hearer or reader (perlocutionary effect)
Defining culture, defining translation
No full textAny discussion of definitions requires a number of provisos. They are, by their very nature, essentialist and positivist in that they distil what is the ‘essentialis ... the nature of a thing ... and what sets it apart’ (Rener 1989, 266; see also Hebenstreit 2007, 11-12). They are also often a descriptione in that they enumerate ‘the various features proper to the thing ...’ (Rener 1989, 266). Who or what is included (and excluded) from a definition easily becomes the object of heated contention, as this affects the size of the discipline, the growth or otherwise of academic departments, the professional status of those who are included in ‘the thing’ (e.g. Marco 2007, 65; Melby et al 2014; Pym, 2014, 49) and much more. Consequently, the task of defining culture and translation can move from difficult to extremely political.
That said, the human race has long been categorising and defining things. Defining dictionaries with commentary and glosses have been around since the third century BCE (Considine 2015, 605). Today the world’s ‘best-selling regularly updated book’ with 400 million sales is Xinhua Zidian [The New Chinese Character Dictionary] (Press Centre 2016). In 2014, Merriam Webster (whose Collegiate Dictionary ranks as the next best-selling dictionary with sales of 55 million) announced ‘culture’ as their ‘Word of the Year’ because it had ‘the biggest spike in look-ups’ (Steinmetz 2014) on their website. ‘People were desperate to know what “culture” meant’ (Rothman 2014.), a strong indication of what Tymoczko (2007) calls the ‘definitional impulse’: the human need for closure, and the need to put things in boxes, or at least, as Wittgenstein (1958) would have it, to organise according to ‘family resemblance’ (Familienähnlichkeit) (32-33). In short, there is an innate human need to classify and organise ‘what is what’ (and to distinguish it from what is not what).
Categorisation has traditionally been conceived in terms of horizontal co-hyponymic and vertical hypernymic levels. Here we will loosely follow Bateson (1972) and Goffman (1986) and their understanding of categorisation of experience, in terms of ‘framing’ (see also Katan 2004, 49-56). At the horizontal level, we frame ‘types of’ translation (such as literal, free or audio-visual) or ‘types of’ culture (ethnic, religious and national). Clearly there are problems in deciding where the horizontal frame boundaries are and, indeed, even if ‘the type’ itself is valid within the wider frame. A perfect case in point is Hatim and Munday’s (2004, 6) question: ‘Where do we draw the line between “translation” and “adaptation?”’
However, it is with the vertical, or wider, frames that the major issues come into view, as the widening of context or perspective brings to the fore previously unquestioned boundaries, which focus not only on ‘what’ is to be included, but also ‘in which historical period/geographical/linguistic domain’, ‘according to which discipline’, and finally even ‘according to which underlying motivations.’ In short, there is a hierarchy of ever-widening frames, each of which contextualises the frame it encloses. This in itself is problematic when it comes to definitions, which themselves presume—in enclosing the essentialisness—to be the ultimate frame.
Post-positivism brings to the fore these hidden assumptions. Clearly, this includes questioning the validity of the definition frame itself. Post-positivists suggest that although phenomena may (possibly) be observed, it is the observer’s subjectivity that will bias what is perceived towards a particular construction of ‘reality’ and towards a particular way of defining ‘the thing’. As we can see, terms at the post-positivist chunk-level come with inverted commas, suggesting that the ‘objective’ terms themselves are to be reflected on and ‘problematised’. To be fair, positivists also accept that definitions and norms are socially constructed, and are not impervious to change over time (e.g. Chesterman 1997).
We can organise these paradigms in terms of broadness of view, context or abstraction. A useful starting point is Hall’s (1990) framing of culture into a ‘major triad’ (see Katan 2004, 44-48). Hall adapts Freud’s metaphor of an iceberg, originally used to explain that the most important workings of the mind operate unconsciously, out-of-awareness. This unconscious level guides judgement, which then guides visible behaviour. Hall organised culture into three systems acting at different levels of visibility: the visible (technical), the partially submerged (formal) and finally the invisible (informal) out-of-awareness level. The metaphor highlights the fact that the most important aspects of culture are hidden. At the same time, it is these aspects that evaluate what is normal or right, and consequently guide the visible behaviour. The same iceberg metaphor can also be used to discuss ‘translation’. The visible responds to ‘what’ is tangible: the product (the source and the target texts). The partially submerged refers to the ‘how’: the processes of translation; while the most hidden aspects explore the motivations (the ‘why’), the beliefs, values and ideologies that govern both processes and product
HarperCollins English-Italian Italian-English Dictionary
No full text(co-redattore) HarperCollins, Glasgo
Look Who's Talking: The Ethics of Entertainment and Talkshow Interpreting
Get PDFThe role of interpreters working on Italian television is undergoing change. The traditional role, that of an invisible black box, is being challenged by what we define as an ethics of entertainment. The three principal factors affecting this ethics are professional performing capacity, ‘the comfort factor’, and the context of culture. A corpus of 200 hours of Italian talk show interpreting is drawn on to illustrate the tension between the traditional norms of fidelity or invisibility and the needs of TV emotainment (visible involvement and performance). In analyzing the successful interpreter’s strategies and behaviour we suggest that a solution to this double bind lies in an expansion of the traditional role toward multivariate mediation encompassing varying perceptual positions and sensitivity to context
Towards an Intercultural Weltanschauung for the Language Teacher
No full texta cura di Silvana Schiavi Fachin, Forum/ Editrice universitaria udines
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