Edited by Elisabet Tiselius (Stockholm), Claudine Borg (Malta) and María Abad Colom (Oslo)
Dear EST members,
As we are drawing closer to summer in the northern hemisphere and the possibility of getting vaccinated has developed from an ephemeral dream to actual reality, our May 2021 and 58th issue of the Newsletter reaches your inboxes.
We are happy to introduce our first column of Emerging Voices in Translation Studies, in which Laura Ivaska of the University of Turku in Finland writes about indirect translation. We hope you enjoy the column with contributions from post-graduate students. Help us by encouraging your PhD students and postdocs to submit a text featuring their work.
As life slowly returns to normal we are happy that we can report a few more EST activities and TS initiatives; in the ID-TS section you will find a report from Aurélien Riondel, PhD student at the University of Geneva, about his research stay at the University of Tampere.
We also hope you enjoy a really Hot Topic on machine-assisted literary translation with texts by Kristiina Taivalkoski-Shilov, Antonio Toral and Paola Ruffo.
As usual we warmly thank EST members and colleagues outside EST who have contributed to this Newsletter. We are looking forward to your ideas, suggestions, comments and contributions for the November 2021 Newsletter via secretarygeneralest@gmail.com
Bonne lecture! Elisabet,ClaudineandMaría
Elisabet Tiselius Stockholm University
Claudine Borg University of Malta
María Abad Colom OsloMet University
Word from the President
Preparations for the 10th EST Congress in Oslo 22-24 June 2022 are moving ahead quickly. Please check out the website regularly to get all the relevant information. The general umbrella theme this time is ‘Advancing Translation Studies’. As has now become a tradition, the Congress will be organised around thematic sections. Please note that the deadline for panel proposals is imminent (30 May 2021). Do not hesitate to come forward with proposals!
The same appeal applies, with less urgency, if your university would like to make a bid to host the 11th EST Congress in 2025 (see the full call further on or here). Bids are welcome from all over the world. Our association has its roots in Europe, but welcomes members from every continent, aims to promote Translation Studies everywhere, and is not restricted to holding its tri-annual Congress on the European continent.
We are confident that by June 2022 travel and other restrictions will have been lifted. Therefore, the EST Executive Board has again decided to offer a number of travel grants to enable e.g. junior researchers with limited means to participate physically in the Congress. We are still discussing exactly what criteria should be applied as well as the number and size of grants we will offer. When decided, the result will be published on our electronic channels and on the Oslo2022 Congress website.
An important recent initiative taken by the Board is to introduce an Open Access Prize (more inside). This will allow prize winners’ research and ideas to reach more readers and gain more impact. I am very happy to welcome all of the committee members on board and grateful for the support we have received in this matter from two leading publishers. My thanks also go to Luc van Doorslaer, who has been the prime mover in this matter.
But all is not well everywhere. Management at Aston University has published alarming plans to close the Department of History, Languages and Translation. On behalf of our Society, I have expressed my grave concern about these plans and asserted the value for universities of having staff who specialise in mediating across knowledge areas and languages (link). Such plans underscore the importance of strengthening an appreciation of the real benefits that TS departments contribute to universities by facilitating exchange of knowledge of every kind in the world, across disciplines, cultures, minds and languages.
Many thanks to the editorial team for preparing this issue of the Newsletter, which I trust you will all enjoy reading.
ArntLykkeJakobsen
EST President May2021
Initiatives by the Board
10th EST Congress 22–24 June 2022 in Oslo, Norway
Call for panels, venue and guest speakers
We would like to remind the EST community that the call for panels for the 10th EST Congress on June 22-24, 2022, is now open until May 30, 2021. The congress will be hosted by the University of Oslo (UiO) and Oslo Metropolitan University (OsloMet). The venue for June 22 is Frydenlund campus at OsloMet, while for June 23 and 24 the venue is Blindern Campus at UiO. The two campuses are both located close to the city center and are only a ten-minute tram ride apart.
As we know that EST congresses are a unique opportunity to bring together numerous specialists in very diverse areas of Translation Studies, do not miss this opportunity to participate as a panel convener. The scientific committee, led by Cecilia Alvstad, is eager to read many challenging and innovative proposals. Please review the call and check how to submit your panel proposal on our website. For those wondering about the calendar of some relevant events coming up, the call for papers will be opened from July 1 to October 1, 2021, once we have a list of accepted panels. We expect to have the final list of conveners and presenters in December 2021.
In addition, we are also delighted to confirm the participation of two great guest speakers: Jemina Napier and Michael Cronin. Stay tuned for more news soon and visit our website: hf.uio.no/est. We are looking forward to seeing you in Oslo in June 2022!
New EST Open Access Prize
As in most other disciplines, free access to publications is also becoming more and more important in Translation Studies. Some journals are already freely available, but many are not. EST is now launching its Open Access Prize in cooperation with two publishing houses: one free-access article in a Routledge journal and one in a Benjamins journal. More information on the exact criteria and procedure will be published on our website soon. The first prizes will be awarded during the EST Congress in Oslo in 2022.
Chair of the Open Access Prize Committee is Luc van Doorslaer. The other members are Piotr Blumczynski, Helle Dam, Sandra Halverson, Dorothy Kenny, and Loredana Polezzi.
The EST Open Access Prize is supported by John Benjamins and Routledge.
Call for contributions to the Emerging Voices Column
We are looking for contributions to our new column Emerging Voices in Translation Studies dedicated to research by PhD students or recent PhD graduates. We welcome a maximum of three contributions in each issue. Contributions about a PhD dissertation or current project can be accepted from current PhD students or recent PhD graduates who finished their studies within the last 12 months. Texts should be no longer than 600 words each (incl. bibliography) and are to follow the guidelines for the ‘Emerging Voices Column’ section in the EST NL available here
List of book series
As members know, EST keeps track of translation journals. We are now also compiling book series and they can be viewed on our website in the same online form as the journals. You can find the list here. If you would like a book series to be included please send an e-mail to secretarygeneralest@gmail.com
Publications from EST Congresses
If you know of any publications that originated in EST Congresses and are not yet listed on our website here, please let us know by sending the details to secretarygeneralest@gmail.com
The 2021 directory of members
The updated directory of members has been posted on our Intranet. It includes details of members who paid their fees for 2021 and have requested that their names be listed in the directory. If you want to update your details, please send an e-mail to secretarygeneralest@gmail.com
Reminder: discounts from publishers for EST members
The Society has arranged for members to have regular discounts on books from John Benjamins, Multilingual Matters, Rodopi (currently an imprint of Brill), Routledge and Bloomsbury. For more details, discount codes and an updated list, please check out our Intranet
Communication channels and policies
New publications in Translation Studies come to our attention in various ways (e.g. publishers' websites, information from members through channels such as our online forms and e-mail). Notices about new books that our volunteers manage to scan appear in the biannual Newsletter and most also appear in our social media streams. Notices about new publications do not appear in the biweekly email digest, which for reasons of space focuses on time-sensitive information such as calls for conference submissions, calls for papers, and job opportunities. Please use the online forms accessible from the EST website or from the links listed below if you have information relevant to Translation Studies that you would like to have distributed via our channels.
Reminder: announcements of events and other TS-related news items
Thank you for sending us information about books, journal calls for papers, conferences and other news items to post in our Facebook group and Twitter feed. All you need to do is fill in the appropriate form and hit submit. You can also find links to all forms on the EST homepage.
For announcements of new issues and journal calls for papers: https://goo.gl/forms/hUBT58u8Ejmfi3vC2. For conference announcements and conference calls for papers: https://goo.gl/forms/gdrywrMnaToopn9B2. For general announcements not covered by the other forms: https://goo.gl/forms/wt4lHLg9mCWxiWD43.
We are looking forward to hearing from you.
Open letter to the Vice Chancellor of Aston University
The EST Board has expressed its grave concern about the plans recently announced by Aston University to close their Department of History, Languages and Translation and with them the MA in Translating for Business and International Institutions, a programme accredited by the EMT network, and the MA in TESOL and Translation Studies. The EST statement sent to the Vice Chancellor is enclosed below.
To the attention of:
Vice Chancellor Professor Alec Cameron
The Board of the European Society for Translation Studies would like to express its grave concern at the announced plan to close the Department of History, Languages and Translation at Aston University. As a society of Translation Studies researchers, we are particularly concerned at the prospect of two internationally respected MA programmes being discontinued: the MA in Translating for Business and International Institutions, a programme accredited by the European Master’s in Translation network, and the MA in TESOL and Translation Studies. We believe that closing down these two programmes together with the underlying undergraduate programmes would be severely detrimental to the international reputation of Aston University. Closure of the Department would send the unfortunate signal that the governing bodies at Aston University believe all business can be conducted in English, with little or no awareness of history or foreign languages, and that health can be studied independently of the quality of communication about it, not to mention dealing with the challenges associated with serving immigrant populations. Whatever programmes a university with international ambitions might wish to focus on strategically, they should be accompanied and supported by activities promoting international communication and access, not just in the local language, even when that is one of the ‘world’ languages.
In our view, a translation programme is important both to business and industry and to the well-functioning and well-being of a community, multilingual or not. For many years, Aston University has successfully maintained a very strong and internationally recognised position in Translation Studies and, with renowned British tolerance and flexibility, has contributed to generating a broader outlook. Business, engineering and health programmes, to be strong internationally, benefit from interdisciplinary cooperation with MA programmes in translation, albeit perhaps slightly revised to fit Aston University’s new overall strategy. As you are certainly aware, the Western academic world now stresses the inherent value of interdisciplinarity, but in practice researchers often experience difficulties communicating about and across very different methodological and epistemological perspectives. Mediating across such disciplinary/cultural/linguistic barriers is an important specialty of Translation Studies, and universities would be wise to exploit strengths they may not even realize they have in this regard.
We are aware that Aston obviously has to consider the immediate context in which it exists in working out its strategy. From a European point of view, however, a plan to close down the Department of History, Language and Translation is very likely to be seen as the start of a retreat into a weaker English-only existence. We therefore strongly recommend that the plans to close Aston University’s Department of History, Languages and Translation be reconsidered.
Frederiksberg, 12 May 2021
On behalf of EST, the European Society for Translation Studies.
Arnt Lykke Jakobsen, prof. Emeritus, Copenhagen Business School, President of EST.
The International Network of doctoral programmes in Translation Studies (ID-TS)
ID-TS – the pandemic experience
The past year has been exceptional in the life of our still relatively young network of PhD training institutions. In the previous newsletter we reported on the successful first-ever virtual student conference hosted by Boğaziçi University, Istanbul. This time, with the gracious support of our guest author Aurélien Riondel, we wish to remind you that even amidst a global pandemic, PhD projects are carried out, and for many, the funding and the requirements allow and/or require a longer stay in another research environment. This is a wonderful opportunity for internationalization and networking, but only if the match is good. To support finding the best match for research visits, joint supervision and examiner tasks, the ID-TS network keeps a regularly updated register of expertise in each member institution.
This members-only listing allows PhD students and their supervisors to go beyond the familiar names and to assess the wider spectrum of fruitful contacts in a particular potential target of a research visit. We encourage members to browse the register for new contacts. One core mission of the network is to support younger TS scholars in their path towards excellence in supervision. International collaboration is one important step in this journey, and hosting a visiting scholar is also a merit in the process of building one’s own research team. A win-win situation. As we are beginning to see a way out of the current global situation, PhD exchanges hopefully gain new force in the near future.
Kaisa Koskinen, Secretary of ID-TS
For more information on the ID-TS work, please visit the website
Lockdown across Europe: Good
time for an academic stay 2500km
away from home?
Since the COVID-19 pandemic broke out, international mobility has been a real challenge. I was lucky enough to plan my stay during the summer of 2020, when only the most pessimistic – or realistic – of us expected that such a big second wave would sweep over Europe. My project was also made easier by my colleagues in Finland, who gave me the necessary support before and after my arrival.
The word that best fits my experience here is intensity. During my stay at Tampere University, I had the opportunity to devote my time exclusively to research, whereas my position in my home university (both institutions are ID-TS members) is a mix of research, support in teaching and administrative tasks. I really enjoyed spending all my time focusing on my PhD. My work could reach a depth I would not have expected.
Even if it should not be one’s main reason to choose a destination, having a good working environment is of utmost importance. Tampere
is lovely. It is surrounded by lakes and forests (note the plural), located within walking distance, whose natural beauty helped me. That was a pleasant surprise, because I had no previous knowledge of the city. Until a few weeks before my arrival, I could not even pinpoint it on a map... I really chose to come here for the expertise of Kaisa Koskinen. On top of that, the university provided me with a desk in an office from which I can even enjoy beautiful sunsets.
Notwithstanding the pandemic, there were opportunities for academic exchanges. I was able to have regular meetings with my supervisor here, meet other PhD students – including one working in my field –, give a presentation in two different courses, take part in the doctoral seminar and present my research there, attend a workshop on academic writing and have regular contact with a few colleagues from different backgrounds who regularly come to the campus.
All in all, this experience brought me many benefits, including making progress in my own work, comparing my ideas with those of others, meeting new people and expanding my intellectual horizon.
Aurélien Riondel
Faculty of Translation and Interpreting, University of Geneva
This stay was supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation (Grant No. P1GEP1_195089).
EST Activities
Summer
School Scholarship Committee
Alexandra Assis Rosa ChairoftheSummerSchoolScholarship Committee
Intensive summer school courses for researchers preparing a doctoral dissertation in Translation Studies are slowly recovering from the Covid-19 pandemic, so our committee is looking forward to handling this year’s applications. The deadline was on May 15th this year.
The members of the Committee are Barbara Ahrens (Cologne University of Applied Sciences, Germany), Alexandra Assis Rosa (Chair, University of Lisbon, Portugal), Helle V. Dam (Aarhus University, Denmark), Maria Piotrowska (Pedagogical University Krakow and Jagiellonian University, Poland), Franz Pöchhacker (University of Vienna, Austria), and Sonia Vandepitte (Ghent University, Belgium).
The silver lining in last year’s dark cloud was that last year’s Summer School Scholarship budget was added to this year’s budget. This will double the number of scholarships offered. We will gladly (oh, so gladly!) vet this year’s applications from potential Summer School candidates. It is about time.
EST Wikicommittee
KyriakiKourouni
Chair of the EST Wikicommittee
The EST Wikicommittee was set up at the beginning of 2017. It is the result of an EST Board initiative to improve the quality of information on the web about translation and Translation Studies. Participation is
open to all. The priorities of the Committee include:
-Creation of new articles to fill gaps
-Improvement of existing articles
-Tagging articles of interest to the project
-Provision of up-to-date information about concepts and terminology
-Updating of bibliographical references
-Translating of entries into more languages -Creation and consistent use of relevant categories
Participation may also include organizing training events or Edit-a-thons.
Three Editathons took place this March in Sweden, Spain and Greece to celebrate International Women’s Day, and provide visibility to women in translation and/or Translation Studies. A report is available at the Past TS Events section. Students and colleagues alike joined in with great enthusiasm, giving us the impetus to organize similar events next year.
Next scheduled event: EST Wikicommittee Editathon goes to #EST22Oslo! Stay tuned!
In the meantime, we are happy to endorse training events and Edit-a-thons and we invite article writers and editors to record their participation and progress by making appropriate additions to the Wikiproject page. Twitterers are also warmly encouraged to tweet new articles under the hashtag #tswikiproject.
EST Book Purchase Grant 2021
MügeIşıklarKoçak, Chair of EST BPG Committee
The research team in the Department of Translation Studies and Contrastive Linguistics, Ivan Franko National University of Lviv, Ukraine is the winner of the Book Purchase Grant 2021. The Department was established in 1998 as a separate unit at the Faculty of Foreign Languages, and it offers a vast array of courses in Translation Studies, including theoretical and applied Translation Studies, contrastive linguistics and interpreting at undergraduate and graduate levels. The department has around
600 BA students, nearly 50 MA students and 5 PhD students. We have noted that researchers in the department have been working hard and their areas of research are wide-ranging, in line with their programs.
Let us see what the representative of our winner, Prof. Iryna Odrekhivska, has to say about their winning the Book Purchase Grant 2021:
“We are honored, thrilled and feel so grateful to receive the 2021 EST Book Grant! As we are actively engaged in redesigning our curriculum and courses within the BA and MA programs in Translation and Translation Studies, it is incredibly rewarding to be rendered such invaluable assistance in purchasing the relevant books. They will contribute to opening new vistas and opportunities for our students in learning audiovisual translation, localization industry and novel areas of specialized translation, as well as to reinforce the courses in literary translation, translation history and sociology. It is vital to emphasize that EST plays a unique role in creating an inclusive translational space in the world of academia, addressing the needs of institutions, and showing an importance of ‘translative thinking’ in the educational environment. We are very thankful to EST for your efforts and support.”
Prof. Iryna Odrekhivska, with colleagues at the Department of Translation Studies and Contrastive Linguistics, Ivan Franko National University of Lviv. More information is available with this link.
Finally, I would like to thank all committee members for their valuable work. I would like to take this opportunity to urge new applicants to apply and previous ones to reapply for the EST Book Purchase Grant 2022 (March 31st). We invite all of our members to inform their universities and TS research centers of the possibility that any institutions
dealing with TS are eligible to apply for the Book Purchase Grant if at least one of their teaching staff, researchers or graduate students is a paid-up EST member.
Details on how to apply are available on the EST website.)
Young Scholar Prize Committee
Aline Remael ChairoftheYoungScholarPrizeCommittee
As the date of the next EST conference, Advancing Translation Studies, to be held in Oslo from 22 to 24 June 2022, is slowly drawing closer, so is the date for submissions to the EST Young Scholar Prize. The deadline is 31 January 2022
We would therefore like to remind and encourage those young scholars who have recently completed their PhDs and those who are working on the completion of their
PhD to submit their thesis by this date. The work must have been completed and approved by the relevant doctoral committee.
The winner and runner-ups will be announced in Oslo. The YSP winner and shortlist will be published on the EST website.
Please consult the EST website for more information
We look forward to reading your work.
EST biannual
Translation Prize
Isabelle Robert Chair of the Translation Prize Committee
The EST Translation Prize is awarded every second year to the most deserving project to translate key texts in Translation Studies (including research on interpreting and localization).
The Translation Committee encourages EST members to already start thinking about a project for the 2022 edition. Please spread the word about the possibility to make Translation Studies research available in more languages.
The next deadline is 1 October 2022. For details on how to apply for the prize, please visit the EST website
Hot Topics in Translation Studies: Machine assisted literary translation
New
opportunities for research in literary translation:
The uses of translation technology in the literary translation process
Kristiina Taivalkoski-Shilov UniversityofTurku
Translation technology has become part and parcel of professional translation. In nonliterary translation, computer-aided human translation (CAT), including the use of translation memory (TM) and terminology tools, has become commonplace in translation professionals’ everyday lives. Human-aided machine translation (e.g., post-editing machine translation (MT) output) has also become prevalent in the translation workplace. Technologization has obliged non-literary translators to adapt to the situation. Many of them have in fact taken a favorable attitude toward new technology in cases where it increases their efficiency (Koskinen & Ruokonen 2017: 8, 21; Moorkens 2017: 470–471). In ideal circumstances, CAT tools and editing software have been shown to improve translators’ output, enhance their long-term memory and to free up their cognitive resources for complex tasks by relieving them of repetitive and tedious tasks (Ehrensberger-Dow 2017: 337, 340; Koskinen & Ruokonen 2017: 14; O’Brien 2012: 105, 107; Risku & Windhager 2013: 42). Having said that, there is also evidence of negative effects of translation technology on the human translator. For instance, research on post-editing MT indicates that it may cause cognitive and emotional stress (Koponen 2016; see also Moorkens et al. 2018).
Unlike their colleagues involved with nonliterary translation, literary translators have
not been required to use CAT tools by their clients. The downside of this privilege is that no technological tools have been systematically designed to enhance their work. Many literary translators have also been known to shun translation technology, although they have also benefited from the general technologization of translation. In the era of Internet search engines and online dictionaries and encyclopedias, information mining is significantly easier than in previous decades and centuries (see O’Brien 2012: 105). It is possible to envisage that CAT tools could also be useful in literary translation, especially if they are tailored for the specific needs of these kinds of translations and their readers. Furthermore, not all literary translators are unfamiliar or uncomfortable with translation technology. Recent research (e.g. Rothwell 2019; Taivalkoski-Shilov 2019: 691) on the uses of translation technology by literary translators indicates that some of them already consistently use CAT tools. It is probable that there is an emerging demand for literature-specific CAT tools, provided that their development is based on careful research on literary translators’ needs vis-àvis translation and provided that translation professionals have a say in the translation tool design (for a discussion of the failure to account for translator needs when introducing translation technology to the translation workplace, see EhrensbergerDow 2017: 339; O’Brien 2012: 109, 115, 117).
Research on the opportunities of translation technologies for “creative-text translation” started in the 2010s and has become a growing trend in the 2020s. Initial research on the applicability of MT to literary translation (e.g. Jurafsky & Voigt 2012; Besacier 2014; Toral & Way 2015; Toral & Way 2018) was done mainly by specialists of MT without a background in Translation Studies or literary studies. Now this topic has started to interest translation scholars and other specialists of literary translation as well (see Kenny & Winters 2020, and the 4th issue of Counterpoint (2020), CEATL’s European Literary Translators’ E-zine). Multidisciplinary research and publication projects as well as PhD dissertations are also on the way (for finished PhD projects, see Youdale [2017] 2020 and Ruffo 2020).
Interestingly, this new topic in Translation Studies provides an opportunity to benefit from research done in one of the oldest fields of Translation Studies, that is, research in literary translation, which had once been pushed to the margins of our discipline (see Dam and Koskinen 2016: 3). Now the methods and results of basic research into literary translation have become relevant for anyone who wants to develop high-quality translation technology for literary translators. For instance, studies on shifts, style and “voice” in literary translation are essential for this new type of research. The work on human-induced shifts in translation done by previous translation scholars can help us predict the kinds of biases that may occur in machine learning when tailoring translation technology tools for literary translation. Furthermore, the contemporary notions of style and (the narrator’s/character’s/translator’s) voice in translation are important when extracting knowledge of literary texts for MT systems or evaluating MT(-assisted) output. Finally, work on the literary translation process (e.g. Borg 2016) can help improve the ergonomics of CAT tools designed for literary translators. This is a good example of the importance of freedom of research in the humanities, which is not only an intrinsically valuable principle but also a contributor to progress in unforeseen ways.
References
Besacier, L. 2014. ”Traduction automatisée d’une œuvre littéraire: Une étude pilote”. Paper presented at the 21ème Traitement Automatique du Langage Naturel (TALN 2014), Marseille. http://www.aclweb.org/anthology/F142001.pdf. Accessed April 28, 2021.
Borg, C. 2016. A Literary Translation in the Making: An in-depth investigation into the processofaliterarytranslationfromFrench into Maltese. Doctoral dissertation, University of Aston.
Dam, H. V. & Koskinen, K. 2016. ”The translation profession: centres and peripheries: Introduction”. The Journal of SpecialisedTranslation 25: 2-13.
Ehrensberger-Dow, M. 2017. “An ergonomic perspective of translation”. In The Handbook of Translation and Cognition, J.W. Schwieter & A. Ferreira (eds), 332-349. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley & Blackwell.
Heijden van der, H., Larchet, A., & Wammen J. 2020. Counterpoint: CEATL’s European Literary Translators’ E-zine 4 (Special Feature: Machine Translation) https://www.ceatl.eu/wpcontent/uploads/2020/12/Counterpoint_20 20_04.pdf. Accessed April 28, 2021.
Jurafsky, D. & Voigt, R. 2012. “Towards a Literary Machine Translation: The Role of Referential Cohesion”. Proceedings of the NAACL-HLT2012Workshopon ComputationalLinguisticsforLiterature, 18–25. https://www.aclweb.org/anthology/W122503.pdf. Accessed April 28 2021.
Kenny, D. & Winters, M. 2020. “Machine translation, ethics and the literary translator’s voice”. TranslationSpaces9 (1): 123-149.
Koponen, M. 2016. Machine translation post-editingandeffort:Empiricalstudieson the post-editing process. Doctoral dissertation, University of Helsinki.
Koskinen, K., & Ruokonen, M. 2017. “Love letters or hate mail: Translators’ technology acceptance in the light of their emotional narratives”. In Human issues in translation technology: The IATIS yearbook, D. Kenny (ed), 8-24. London: Routledge.
Moorkens, J. 2017. “Under pressure: Translation in times of austerity”. Perspectives 25 (3): 464-477.
Moorkens, J., Toral, A., Castilho, S. & Way, A. 2018. “Translators’ perceptions of literary post-editing using statistical and neural machine translation”. Translation Spaces 7 (2): 240-262.
O’Brien, S. 2012. “Translation as humancomputer interaction”. TranslationSpaces 1 (1): 101-122.
Risku, H. & Windhager, F. 2013. “Extended Translation: A sociocognitive research agenda”. Target 25 (1): 33-45.
Rothwell, A. 2019. “Retranslating Zola in Stereo: Working with/against Vizetelly”. The University of Manchester. Events at the University of Manchester. CTIS Seminar. https://events.manchester.ac.uk/event/eve nt:q6h-jotyy6j3-7coj0u/ctis-seminarretranslating-zola-in-stereo-workingwithagainst-vizetelly. Accessed April 28, 2021.
Ruffo, P. 2020. In-between role and technology: literary translators on navigating the new socio-technological paradigm. Doctoral dissertation, Heriot Watt University.
Taivalkoski-Shilov, K. 2019. “Ethical Issues Regarding Machine(-assisted) Translation of Literary Texts”. Perspectives 27 (5): 689703.
Toral, A., & Way, A. 2015. “Machine-assisted translation of literary text: A case study”. TranslationSpaces 4 (2): 240-267.
Toral, A., & Way, A. 2018. “What level of quality can neural machine translation attain on literary text?” In Translation Quality Assessment: From Principles to Practice, J. Moorkens, S. Castilho, F. Gaspari, & S. Doherty (eds), 263-287. Berlin/Heidelberg: Springer.
Youdale, R. 2017/2020. UsingComputers in theTranslationofLiteraryStyle:Challenges andOpportunities. London: Routledge.
Should we dare to imagine a future without
MT?
Heriot-WattUniversity
It is a widespread assumption that literary translators resist technological innovation in their profession, and certainly one I was inclined to believe when I first embarked on my doctorate to explore the relationship between literary translators’ self-image and their attitudes towards technology. My initial belief was further reinforced by practitioners’ strong reactions to my questionnaire when I first posted it on translator forums online. Some thought researching the link between literary translators’ self-image and technology was simply a waste of time and money (“one is a sociological issue, the other is related to IT”), while a few others started questioning my identity, as I could not possibly be a real translator and researcher thinking technology had any place in literary translation (in their defence, I do share my name with the former Queen of Belgium, and she tends to come up first when you look me up on Google). Far from being deterred by these comments, I was
intrigued by them. If anything, they warranted further analysis, and convinced me even more that this type of research was indeed necessary, and that these feelings deserved to be investigated and understood.
The 150 responses to the questionnaire highlighted not only literary translators’ desire to be heard by researchers and translation technology developers, but also their sometimes unconscious belief that technology is indeed already deeply intertwined with their profession and is affecting the way they see and present themselves to the world. While their attitudes towards technology emerged as extremely complex, these were predominantly positive. That being said, it was possible to consistently link the more positive attitudes to technology that was not translation-specific (e.g., online dictionaries, word processing software, timemanagement apps, terminology tools, etc.).
Conversely, Computer-Aided Translation (CAT) tools, Translation Memory (TM), and Machine Translation (MT) were generally seen as hindering, not compatible with literary translation and/or interfering with originality and creativity. Interestingly, the discerning factor between a positive and a negative stance seemed to be whether they perceived the tool (or the narrative surrounding it) as aligned with their view of the profession. For example, while TMs were generally seen as helpful in maintaining consistency in a long text and compensating for the shortcomings of human memory, MT was invariably associated with feelings of frustration and dehumanisation. While literary translators’ self-image appeared to be rooted in quintessentially human traits, such as creativity, artistry, cultural and literary knowledge, social responsibility, and time spent alone with the text, MT was often characterised as its direct opposite: an intrusive tool “for people in a hurry” that unjustifiably comes between the translator and their translation, preventing them from doing their job as intended.
In this respect, the unsuitability of MT for literary translation was the only thing respondents seemed to unanimously agree on, and thus a discrepancy between research and practice started to emerge. In fact, research on the application of technology to literary translation has tended to focus primarily on MT (Voigt and Jurafsky 2012; Jones and Irvine 2013; Toral and Way 2014, 2015, 2018; Besacier and Schwartz 2015; Tezcan, Daems, and Macken 2019; Murchú 2019), with only a few studies including or focusing on literary translators’ attitudes (Ruffo 2018, 2021; Slessor 2019; Moorkens et al. 2018; Kenny and Winters 2020) or adopting a non MT-centric framework (Youdale 2019; Youdale and
Paola Ruffo
Rothwell, forthcoming). Although literary translators’ perceptions alone are not (and should not be) reason enough to stop researching the application of MT to literary translation altogether, ignoring them would be counterproductive at best. At this point, a future where MT has no place in literary translation could probably be classified as a utopian (or dystopian, depending on whom you are speaking to) fantasy. However, the question arises of whether its prominence in the socio-technological discourse is preventing us from seeing other potentially more sustainable and creative approaches to the increasing technologization of the profession. In particular, the study results suggest that redressing the balance between researchers, practitioners, and tool developers could help to open up new avenues for a type of technological innovation that benefits all parties involved while also being in line with translators’ selfimage. In other words, we should dare to imagine a future where literary translators are organically involved in decision-making processes that directly affect the way they work and perceive the world, with the main aim being to devise new technology that works withthe translator more than it works instead of them. Technological advances that align with the image literary translators project onto the world could allow them to “become rather their inner Picasso” (Large 2018: 96) by carving new paths for creativity to manifest and develop, and, in turn, new ways of conceiving of literary translation as well as its processes and products. What could this new creativity look like? That is up to us to discover.
References
Besacier, Laurent, and Lane Schwartz. 2015. “Automated Translation of a Literary Work: A Pilot Study”. In Proceedingsof the Fourth Workshop on Computational Linguistics for Literature, 114–22. Denver, Colorado, USA: Association for Computational Linguistics.
Jones, Ruth, and Ann Irvine. 2013. “The (Un)Faithful Machine Translator”. In Proceedings of the 7th Workshop on LanguageTechnologyforCultural Heritage, Social Sciences, and Humanities, 96–101. Sofia, Bulgaria: Association for Computational Linguistics.
Kenny, Dorothy, and Marion Winters. 2020. “Machine Translation, Ethics and the Literary Translator’s Voice”. Translation Spaces 9 (1): 123–49.
Large, Duncan. 2018. “Could Google Translate Shakespeare?” In Other Words 2019 (52): 79–95.
Moorkens, Joss, Antonio Toral, Sheila Castilho, and Andy Way. 2018. “Translators’ Perceptions of Literary Post-Editing Using Statistical and Neural Machine Translation”. TranslationSpaces 7 (2): 240–62.
Murchú, Eoin P. Ó. 2019. “Using Intergaelic to Pre-Translate and Subsequently Post-Edit a Sci-Fi Novel from Scottish Gaelic to Irish”. In Proceedings of the Qualities of Literary Machine Translation Workshop, 20–25. Dublin, Ireland: European Association for Machine Translation.
Ruffo, Paola. 2018. “Human-Computer Interaction in Translation: Literary Translators on Technology and Their Roles”. In Proceedings of the 40th Conference Translating and the Computer, 127–31. London, UK, November 15-16, 2018: AsLing.
. 2021. “In-between role and technology: literary translators on navigating the new socio-technological paradigm”. PhD thesis, Heriot-Watt University.
Slessor, Stephen. 2019. “Tenacious Technophobes or Nascent Technophiles? A Survey of the Technological Practices and Needs of Literary Translators”. Perspectives 28 (2): 238–52.
Tezcan, Arda, Joke Daems, and Lieve Macken. 2019. “When a “Sport” Is a Person and Other Issues for NMT of Novels”. In Proceedings of the Qualities of Literary Machine Translation Workshop, 40–49. Dublin, Ireland: European Association for Machine Translation.
Toral, Antonio, and Andy Way. 2014. “Is Machine Translation Ready for Literature?” In Proceedings of Translating and the Computer36, 174–76. London.
. 2015. “Translating Literary Text between Related Languages Using SMT”. In Proceedings of the Fourth Workshop on Computational Linguistics for Literature, 123–32. Denver, Colorado, USA: Association for Computational Linguistics.
. 2018. “What Level of Quality Can Neural Machine Translation Attain on Literary Text?” In Translation Quality Assessment: From Principles to Practice, edited by Joss Moorkens, Sheila Castilho, Federico Gaspari, and Stephen Doherty, 263–87. New York: Springer.
Voigt, Rob, and Dan Jurafsky. 2012. “Towards a Literary Machine Translation: The Role of Referential Cohesion”’. In Proceedings of the NAACL-HLT 2012 Workshop on Computational Linguistics for
Literature, 18–25. Montreal, Canada: Association for Computational Linguistics. Youdale, Roy. 2019. UsingComputersinthe TranslationofLiteraryStyle:Challengesand Opportunities. London: Routledge.
Youdale, Roy, and Andrew Rothwell. Forthcoming. “Computer-Assisted Translation (CAT) Tools, Translation Memory and Literary Translation”. In The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Memory, eds. Sharon Deane-Cox and Anneleen Spiessens. London: Routledge.
Machine-assisted Literary Translation: an Oxymoron or a Real Possibility?
Toral Ruiz UniversityofGroningen
At first sight one may think that machine translation (MT) is of no use for literary translation. This has historically been the perceived wisdom (Bellos, 2012) and, indeed, professional literary translators make very little use of MT, if any (Slessor, 2019; Ruffo, 2020; Daems 2021).
And yet, the application of MT (and more widely, the application of translation technologies) to translate literary texts has of late become a hot topic. In the last few years events devoted to this endeavour are sprouting up in both the Translation Studies and MT research communities. These include a workshop at MT Summit 2019, panels at EST 2019 and IATIS 2021, and even a conference: CALT. Furthermore, the last months have seen events addressed to wider audiences, organised by the Goethe Institut, the Association of Catalan Language Writers, and Bologna Children’s Book Fair. In addition to events, it is worth mentioning a recent special issue in a translation journal and a forthcoming book in the series Routledge Advances in Translation (“Using Technologies for Creative-Text Translation”), that is set to be published next year.
Arguably, the main catalyst for the rising popularity of this research topic is the emergence of a new paradigm to MT, neural MT (Bahdanau et al., 2015; Vaswani et al., 2017), which has greatly increased the capabilities of MT. This paradigm is based on deep neural networks and, compared to the previous dominating paradigm (statistical MT), it leads to more fluent and less literal translations (Bentivogli et al., 2016; Toral and Sánchez-Cartagena, 2017). These characteristics would seem to make neural MT particularly suited for literary texts, for
Antonio
which it indeed results in better translation quality (Toral and Way, 2018).
A second factor that is also important yet underestimated in my opinion, has to do with the advent of the ebook, which means there is a large number of books, such as novels and their translations, available in digital format. Thanks to this, it is nowadays possible to build MT systems tailored to literary texts. Such systems have been already used to translate novels, resulting in better translations than those by generalpurpose systems, e.g. Google Translate (Matusov, 2019; Toral et al., 2020).
The use of such MT systems to assist professional literary translators has also been explored. Research to date has investigated MT assistance by means of post-editing, which has been shown to increase translation productivity (Ó Murchú, 2019; Toral et al., 2018). However, this comes at a high price: translators feel limited (Moorkens et al., 2018), their voice gets partially lost (Kenny and Winters, 2020), the resulting translations are less creative (Guerberof and Toral, 2020) and there are ethical concerns (TaivalkoskiShilov, 2019).
I argue that these issues are not caused by MT itself but by the way in which MT is provided to translators, i.e. by means of post-editing: a productivity-driven pipeline that is known to displace and limit translators. Conversely, technologies found to be useful by literary translators are those that, rather than limiting them, do provide them with additional insights, be it searching in on-line dictionaries (Slessor, 2020), supporting distant reading (Youdale, 2019), or assisting with the translation of puns (Miller, 2021), to mention just a few. Inspired by these, I posit that MT assistance could be repurposed to be valuable to literary translators: rather than aiming to increase productivity, the use of MT should be geared towards inspiring translators, e.g. by providing them with additional and varied translations.
In summary, there is no doubt that MT has improved dramatically in the last years and that those improvements result in much better translations for literary texts. That said, there is also no doubt that the way in which MT has been used to date to assist literary translators is rather problematic. In my view, future research in this topic could explore uses of MT to enhance literary translators –e.g. along the lines of the
augmented translation paradigm (Lommel, 2018)– rather than to save them time.
References
Bahdanau, D, Cho, K. and Bengio, Y. 2015. “Neural Machine Translation by Jointly Learning to Align and Translate”. In Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Learning Representations.
Bellos, D. 2012. Is That a Fish in Your Ear?: Translation and the Meaning of Everything. Particular Books.
Bentivogli, L., Bisazza, A., Cettolo, M. and Federico, M. 2016. “Neural versus phrasebased machine translation quality: a case study”. In Proceedings of the 2016 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Austin, TX), 257–267.
Daems, J. 2021. “Wat denken literaire vertalers echt over technologie?” In Dossier Literair vertalen en technologie, Webfilter.
Guerberof, A. and Toral, A. 2020. “The impact of post-editing and machine translation on creativity and reading experience”. Translation Spaces, 9(2), 255–282.
Kenny, D. and Winters, M. 2020. “Machine translation, ethics and the literary translator’s voice”. Translation Spaces, 9(1), 123-149.
Lommel, A. 2018. “Augmented translation: A new approach to combining human and machine capabilities [Conference Presentation]”. 13th Conference of the Association for Machine Translation in the Americas (Volume 2: User Track). 5-12.
Matusov, E. 2019. “The Challenges of Using Neural Machine Translation for Literature”. In Literary Machine Translation Workshop, co-located with Machine Translation Summit 2019. Dublin, Ireland.
Miller, T. 2021. “Human–computer Interaction in Pun Translation”. In the Computer-Assisted Literary Translation Conference. Swansea, Wales.
Moorkens, J., Toral, A., Castilho, S. and Way, A. 2018. “Translators’ perceptions of literary post-editing using statistical and neural machine translation”. Translation Spaces, 7(2), 240-262.
Ó Murchú, E.P. 2019. “Using Intergaelic to pre-translate and subsequently post-edit a
sci-fi novel from Scottish Gaelic to Irish”. In Literary Machine Translation Workshop, colocated with Machine Translation Summit 2019. Dublin, Ireland.
Ruffo, P. 2020. Literary translators' perceptions of their role and attitudes towards technology in the context of an increasingly technology-dependent globalized society (Doctoral dissertation, Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh, Scotland).
Slessor, S. 2020. “Tenacious technophobes or nascent technophiles? A survey of the technological practices and needs of literary translators”. Perspectives, 28(2), 238-252.
Taivalkoski-Shilov, K. 2019. “Ethical issues regarding machine (-assisted) translation of literary texts”. Perspectives, 27(5), 689-703.
Toral, A., Oliver, A. and Ribas Ballestín, P. 2020. “Machine Translation of Novels in the Age of Transformer”. In J. Porsiel (Ed.), Maschinelle Übersetzung für Übersetzungsprofis. 276-295. BDÜ Fachverlag.
Toral, A. and Sánchez-Cartagena, V. M. 2017. “A multifaceted evaluation of neural versus phrase-based machine translation for 9 language directions”. In Proceedings of the 15th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Vol. 1, Long Papers). Valencia, Spain, 1063–1073.
Toral, A. and Way, A. 2018. “What level of quality can Neural Machine Translation attain on literary text?”. In Translation Quality Assessment (pp. 263-287). Springer, Cham.
Toral, A., Wieling, M. and Way, A. 2018. “Post-editing effort of a novel with statistical and neural machine translation”. Frontiers in Digital Humanities, 5, 9.
Vaswani, A., Shazeer, N., Parmar, N., Uszkoreit, J., Jones, L., Gomez, A. N., Kaiser, L. and Polosukhin, I. 2017. “Attention is all you need”. In Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, 6000-6010.
Youdale, R. 2019. Using computers in the translation of literary style. Challenges and opportunities. Routledge Advances in Translation and Interpreting Studies. Routledge.
Emerging voices in Translation Studies
A Mixed-Methods Approach to Indirect Translation: A Case Study of the Finnish Translations of Modern Greek Prose 1952–2004
Laura Ivaska FinnishLiteratureSociety& UniversityofTurku
In my article-based dissertation (Ivaska 2020a), I studied indirect translation (ITr), which, put simply, means translating from translations. For example, the Finnish translation, Kerrominulle,Zorbas(by Vappu Roos), of Nikos Kazantzakis's novel Ο βιος και
(in English Zorba the Greek), was not done from Modern Greek but from the French translation, Alexis Zorba (by Yvonne Gauthier in collaboration with Gisele Prassinos and Pierre Fridas). Here, ITr forms the chain Greek (ultimate source language) > French (mediating language) > Finnish (ultimate target language). The process of ITr may also include compilative and/or collaborative practices, that is, many source texts may be used (as will be exemplified in the penultimate paragraph), and/or the translator may collaborate with someone (as in the case of the French translation of Zorba).
My case study consisted of 22 novels translated from Greek into Finnish between 1952 and 2004, of which 13 were confirmed ITrs. Following a framework proposed by Dirk Delabastita (2008), I studied ITr from the perspectives of status (what translations are claimed to be), origin (what the genesis of a translation was like), and features (what kind of linguistic features translations have). In addition, I contextualized the findings by examining the norms governing the production of the (indirect) translations.
My dissertation was based on mixed methods. On the one hand, the materials were mixed, comprising paratexts, translator bios, the 22 novels, and a corpus of translated and non-translated Finnish. On the other hand, both quantitative and
qualitative methods were employed, including paratextual analysis, methods of genetic translation criticism, and quantitative corpus research methods.
In one of the articles included in the dissertation, the triangulation of paratextual evidence shows that the information on the status of translations offered by bibliographical metadata is not always in line with whether the translations are actually (in)direct (Ivaska 2020b). In another article, the study of the origins of a compilative translation uncover how translators work when using several source texts (Ivaska 2021). In the third article, the study of features through a corpus-based approach suggests that the linguistic profile of ITrs is different from the profiles of direct translations and non-translated texts (Ivaska 2019). In the fourth article, the study of norms shows that, in Finland, attitudes towards ITr are negative, and translators use compilative and collaborative strategies to respond to criticisms, as these strategies help them ascertain that they get the most complete picture of the ultimate source text – even if they cannot translate directly from it (Ivaska & Paloposki 2018).
On a more general level, ITr challenges the idea of the source text–target text relationship as exclusive and binary (cf. Delabastita 2008). Binarity is challenged by the fact that the mediating text in the chain of ITr is simultaneouslya target text (for the ultimate source text) and a source text (for the ultimate target text). Exclusivity, then, is challenged by the fact that in compilative ITr, translators simultaneously use several source texts. For example, the Finnish translation, Veljesviha (by Kyllikki Villa), of Nikos Kazantzakis's novel Οι Αδερφοφάδες is based on three STs: the French translation (Les frères ennemis, by Pierre Aellig), the English translation (The Fratricides, by Athena Gianakas Dallas), and the Greek version of the novel.
As Jeremy Munday (2014: 77) has suggested, microhistories of translation have the “potential to challenge dominant historical discourses of text production", and the study of ITr is no exception. In addition, ITr forces us to reflect on how to define what should be considered a source text.
References
Delabastita, Dirk. 2008. “Status, Origin, Features: Translation and Beyond.” In Beyond Descriptive Translation Studies: Investigations in Homage to Gideon Toury, edited by Anthony Pym & Miriam Shlesinger, 233–246. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Ivaska, Laura. 2019. “Distinguishing Translations from Nontranslations and Identifying (In)direct Translations’ Source Languages.” In ProceedingsoftheResearch Data and Humanities (RDHum) 2019 Conference: Data, Methods and Tools, edited by Jarmo Harri Jantunen, Sisko Brunni, Niina Kunnas, Santeri Palviainen & Katja Västi. Studia Humaniora Ouluensia 17, 125–138. Oulu: University of Oulu. Available at:
Ivaska, Laura. 2020a. A Mixed-Methods Approach to Indirect Translation: A Case StudyoftheFinnishTranslationsofModern Greek Prose 1952–2004. PhD diss., University of Turku. Available at: http://urn.fi/URN:ISBN:978-951-29-8234-9
Ivaska, Laura. 2020b. “Identifying (Indirect) Translations and Their Source Languages in the Finnish National Bibliography Fennica: Problems and Solutions.” MikaEL 13, edited by Ritva Hartama-Heinonen, Laura Ivaska, Marja Kivilehto & Minna Kujamäki, 75–88. Available at: https://www.sktl.fi/@Bin/2269195/MikaEL1 3+-+Ivaska.pdf
Ivaska, Laura. 2021. “The Genesis of a Compilative Translation and Its de Facto Source Text.” In Genetic Translation Studies:ConflictandCollaborationinLiminal Spaces, edited by Ariadne Nunes, Joana Moura & Marta Pacheco Pinto, 71–88 London: Bloomsbury.
Ivaska, Laura and Outi Paloposki. 2018. “Attitudes towards Indirect Translation in Finland and Translators’ Strategies: Compilative and Collaborative Translation.” Translation Studies 11 (1): 33–46.
Munday, Jeremy. 2014. “Using Primary Sources to Produce a Microhistory of Translation and Translators: Theoretical and Methodological Concerns.” The Translator 20 (1): 64–80.
Past TS Events
EST Wikicommittee Celebrating International Women’s Day
KyriakiKourouni
Three Wikipedia Editathons with the support of the EST Wikicommittee took place to celebrate International Women’s Day this year; all held via Zoom due to COVID-19 restrictions.
The Editathon in Stockholm (http://xl8.link/2hk) was held on March 8. Stockholm University’s Institute for Interpreting and Translation Studies (TÖI) collaborated with Wikimedia Sweden, and the event was part of Wikipedias WikiGap actions to close the internet gender gap. Both faculty and students at TÖI participated in the event. The day started with an introduction to Wikipedia entry writing, after which authors could either stay in the Zoom-room for a silent writing session or write on their own and come back to a follow-up session. At the end of the day we counted new entries in Swedish on Aline Remael, Carol O'Sullivan, Mary Carroll, Miriam Shlesinger, Danica Seleskovitch and a profile of Jennie Fors, a leading Swedish public service interpreter. Furthermore, other articles were updated with sources to further close the gender gap.
The Editathon at Tarragona, organized by Universitat Rovira i Virgili (https://xl8.link/rp82aa) was held on March 9. It had one training session, with people working in groups of three and four. Initially, 20 entries were proposed. Later, participants were encouraged to work on the translation and revision of entries of their choices during the following week. Eventually, a total of 60 new entries for female translators and translation scholars were created.
The Editathon at Thessaloniki was held on March 10 (https://blog.wikimedia.gr/2021/03/wikigap-women-in-red-2021). It was a joint effort by the Gender Equality Committee at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (AUTh) and Wikimedia Community User Group Greece, with the support of the Translation, Interpretation and Communication Lab (TICL) of the School of English at AUTh. A total of 156 students and colleagues from faculties and administration participated and translated a total of 91 articles related to women scientists. The Editathon was part of the “Women in Red” initiative aimed at decreasing “red” (void-of-content) entries related to women and at increasing the number of female editors of Wikipedia entries. It is still open for everyone at AUTh wishing to contribute.
We were longing to get together at the same spot and felt disappointed not being able to do so. Nevertheless, all events were much appreciated and distance was partially covered by enthusiasm and determination. Fingers crossed for live events next year!
TS initiatives
The Council of Editors of Translation and Interpreting Studies for Open Science is born
ŁucjaBiel,AnnaJankowska,RicardoMuñoz-Martín,ChristianOlalla-Soler & Sara Rovira-Esteva
The foundational meeting of the Council of Editors of Translation and Interpreting Studies for Open Science (the Open Council) took place on January 21 and 22, 2021. The 32 foundational members of the Open Council are different in nature, but they all come under the umbrella of open access: diamond open-access journals, book series, an encyclopaedia, and bibliographic databases. The Open Council aims to meet the need for a platform to bridge information and initiatives among the platforms promoting open access in Translation and Interpreting Studies.
The Open Council promotes open access in particular, diamond open access but also other practices within open science, such as open data, open methods and tools, open peer-review, and open research evaluation (Pontika et al. 2015). It is rather difficult to quantify to what extent such practices have been implemented in Translation and Interpreting Studies.
For instance, our discipline does not have a specific repository for open data sharing. Open datasets are spread across multiple repositories, whether public (like Figshare or Zenodo), institutional (including those of the authors' universities) or private (such as ResearchGate). Datasets can also be appended as supplementary materials to research outputs and hosted on the websites of the publishing venue, or data repositories can be created for specific studies. This makes it difficult to determine how open Translation and Interpreting Studies is regarding data sharing.
Open peer-review is another case in point. So far, no journal in our discipline has implemented any of the many practices of open peer-review, e.g., open identities, open reports, open interaction, pre-review manuscripts, open final-version commenting, and open platforms (Ross-Hellauer 2017). The Open Council is aware that promoting and sharing open-science practices would certainly be unwise without a careful analysis of the potential benefits and drawbacks of such practices and the specific challenges to their implementation in our discipline. Consequently, the Open Council has created working groups to explore the ways these practices can be better applied in our field.
The Open Council also aims to coordinate initiatives to ensure publishing quality, in line with open science standards and goals. Accordingly, the Open Council has launched three working groups that are exploring issues linked to publishing quality, with a view to establishing recommendations and best practices in the near future. Specifically, work is underway on quality metrics, publishing ethics and policies, and drafting common style guidelines, including a list of common abbreviations and acronyms.
The Open Council is not a closed network, and we wish to be as open a platform as possible, while preserving a set of common features that bring us together. Applications for membership are welcome from initiatives related to open access and publishing, such as bibliographic databases, journals, book series publishers, and encyclopaedias. The main focus of the candidates needs to be on Translation and Interpreting Studies; they further need to grant diamond open, permanent and free access to published scientific works immediately upon publication, and they should have had substantial activity in the last two years. The 32 current members are:
Alfinge Przekładaniec
Bridge: Trends and Traditions in Translation and Interpreting Studies
Clina. An Interdisciplinary Journal of Translation, Interpreting and Intercultural Communication
Cultus: the journal of intercultural mediation and communication
Current trends in translation teaching and learning
Estudios de Traducción
Hermeneus: revista de traducción e interpretación
inTRAlinea
JoSTrans: Journal of Specialised Translation
Journal of Audiovisual Translation
Linguistica Antverpiensia, New Series Themes in Translation Studies
mediAzioni
MikaEL
MonTI: Monografías de Traducción e Interpretación
New Voices in Translation Studies
Panace@
Quaderns: Revista de traducció
Redit: revista electrónica de didáctica de la traducción y la interpretación
Revista Tradumàtica
The Interpreters' Newsletter
trans-kom
Trans. Revista de Traductología
TransActions
Translation Matters
Transletters
TransLogos
“Glossatori” book series
“Translation and Multilingual Natural Language Processing" book series
Encyclopedia of Translation & Interpreting (ENTI)
Translation Studies Journals (RETI)
Bibliography of Interpreting and Translation (BITRA)
The next meeting of the Open Council will be held at the University of Bologna (Italy) in the first term of 2022 and will feature an international symposium on open science in Translation and Interpreting Studies. Our website and social media platforms will be ready very soon. Stay tuned and contact us if you wish more information on how to become a member!
References
Pontika, Nancy, Knoth, Petr, Cancellieri, Matteo and Pearce, Samuel. 2015. “Fostering open science to research using a taxonomy and an eLearning portal”. In Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Knowledge Technologies and Data-Driven Business - i-KNOW ’15, 21-22 Oct: 1–8. New York, NY: ACM Press. https://doi.org/10.1145/2809563.2809571.
Ross-Hellauer, Tony. 2017. “What is open peer review? A systematic review.” F1000Research 6 (1): 588. https://doi.org/10.12688/f1000research.11369.1.
EST endorsed events
COVID-19 still has its grip on us with regard to EST endorsed events, and as a consequence we have no new endorsements to report. Please get in touch with us if you are planning an event which you would like us to endorse. secretarygeneralest@gmail.com
Upcoming TS conferences
The list below is based on the EST list of conferences on the website. Many thanks to David Orrego-Carmona for regularly compiling the list for us.
Please note that due to the current COVID-19pandemic,manyconferenceshavebeencancelled,rescheduledorputonhold.Toaccessthenews aboutspecificconferences,pleasevisittherespectivewebsites.
Date
10/06/2021 1st International conference: Translating Minorities and Conflict in Literature Spain Site
24/06/2021 PaCor 2021 – Parallel Corpora: Creation and Applications
24/06/2021
Spain Site
Picturebooks and graphic narratives in education and translation: Mediation and multimodality. Portugal Site
24/06/2021 Im/politeness and iMean – Pragmatics of Translation
27/06/2021 IPrA 17th International Pragmatics Conference
02/07/2021
16/07/2021
21/07/2021
Simposio Internacional de Investigación Joven en Traducción, Interpretación, Estudios Interculturales y Estudios de Asia OrientalInternational Symposium for Young Researchers in Translation, Interpreting, Intercultural Studies and East Asian Studies
1st UK-China Symposium on T&I Studies: International Symposium on Translation and Interpreting as Social Interaction: Affect, Behaviour and Cognition (7th CATIC conference)
COMELA 2020 Conference on Mediterranean and European Linguistic Anthropology: Bounded Languages… Unbounded
Switzerland Site
Switzerland Site
Spain Site
UK Site
Greece Site
24/08/2021 The Role of Translation in Promoting Global Prosperity and Well-Being Malaysia Site
26/08/2021
The Complexity of Social-Cultural Emergence: Biosemiotics, Semiotics and Translation Studies
Belgium Site
26/08/2021 Exile Networks. Second conference organized by Exil:Trans Austria Site
02/09/2021 Łódź-ZHAW Duo Colloquium on Translation and Meaning
09/09/2021
UCCTS 2020: Using Corpora in Contrastive and Translation Studies (6th edition)
09/09/2021 Philosophy in/on translation
10/09/2021 Specialist Languages: Practice and Theory IV
14/09/2021 7th IATIS Conference – The Cultural Ecology of Translation
16/09/2021
17/09/2021
2nd UMAQ Conference on Understanding Quality in Media Accessibility and Audiovisual Translation
The 7th International Conference on Cognitive Research on Translation and Interpreting 第 第第第第第第第第第第第第第
20/09/2021 Languages & the Media – Riding the Wave
24/09/2021 International phd conference “Via Scientiarum”
Switzerland Site
Italy Site
Austria Site
Poland Site
Spain Site
Spain Site
UK Site
Germany Site
Slovakia Site
Latvia Site
30/09/2021
07/10/2021
11/10/2021
02/11/2021
04/11/2021
18/11/2021
18/11/2021
Robotrad2020 : Vers une robotique du traduire ? // Towards a robotics of translation?
5th International Edition Translation Symposium: Audiovisual Translation and Computer-Mediated Communication: Fostering Access to Digital Mediascapes
10th International Conference of the Iberian Association for Translation and Interpreting Studies (AIETI): Transstextual and cultural navigation/Circum-navegações transtextuais e culturais
3rd International Conference on Translation, Interpreting & Cognition (ICTIC 3)
2nd International Symposium on Translation and Knowledge Transfer: New trends in the theory and practice of translation and interpreting (TRAK)
APTIS 2020 Evolving Profiles: The Future of Translation and Interpreting Training
09/06/2021 Culinary Translation / Traduire le culinaire
France Site
Italy Site
Portugal Site
Italy Site
Ireland Site
Belgium (online) Site
Ireland Site
France Site
02/12/2021 2021 CEL/ELC Conference: Languages and rights for an inclusive society Belgium Site
15/12/2021
Understanding Wikipedia’s Dark Matter: Translation and Multilingual Practice in the World’s Largest Online Encyclopaedia
22/06/2022 10th EST Congress – Oslo 2022
June 2022
FIT World Congress – A World without Barriers: The Role of Language Professionals in Building Culture, Understanding and Peace
04/07/2022 New Trends in Translation and Technology (NeTTT'2020)
21/07/2022
Postponed
Postponed
Postponed
Postponed
Hong Kong Site
Norway Site
Cuba Site
Greece Site
Literature, Culture, and Translation: 2nd International Symposium on Han Suyin Singapore Site
CITI Lima 2020: III Congreso Internacional de Traductores e Intérpretes Peru Site
DIAMESIC 5: 5th Intersteno Conference on parliamentary and other professional reporting, captioning, and accessibility
France Site
Transius Conference in collaboration with IAMLADP’s Universities Contact Group (UCG) Switzerland Site
Fifth International Conference on Research into the Didactics of Translation DidTrad
Spain Site
TS Summer Schools
In chronological order:
Tradumàtica Summer School on Translation Technologies. Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (online). 7–25 June 2021. https://pagines.uab.cat/tradumaticasummerschool/
First International Summer School on Cognitive Translation & Interpreting Studies (CTIS). MC2 Lab, University of Bologna (online), 14–25 June 2021. http://bit.ly/38OMpFT
Doctoral and Teacher-Training Translation Studies Summer School (DOTTSS). Translation and Interpreting Studies Department, Boğaziçi University (online), 5–16 July 2021. Guest professor: Professor Sebnem Susam Saraeva (University of Edinburgh). http://www.dottss.eu/current-summerschool/
Second International Research School for Media Translation and Digital Culture. Baker Centre for Translation and Intercultural Studies at Shanghai International Studies University, 12–17 July 2021. http://bit.ly/3tpiDjN
CETRA Summer School 2021: 32nd Research Summer School. University of Leuven, Leuven Campus, Belgium, 16–27 August 2021. Chair Professor: Brian James Baer (Kent State University). http://www.arts.kuleuven.be/cetra/summer_school
Report from the Translation Studies Bibliographies
TSB - Translation Studies Bibliography Past year’s innovations
Luc van Doorslaer and Yves Gambier,TSBeditors
DominiqueVanSchoor,TSBeditorialassistant
The Translation Studies Bibliography (TSB, see https://www.benjamins.com/online/tsb ), edited by Yves Gambier and Luc van Doorslaer, has been supported by EST and its members from the start in 2004. The bibliography does not include everything published on translation, but has developed selection criteria for the inclusion of scholarly publications in collaboration with its international editorial board. At the moment it systematically covers 68 TS journals and 49 TS book series. More detailed information about the criteria and coverage can be found on the TSB website. Additionally, translation-related material from non-TS publications can also be included. All publications (except for reviews) are provided with an English abstract and keywords.
Thanks to the recent collaboration with the ‘TSB China Center’ at Guangxi University, about 700 selected Chinese publications have been added over the past year. TSB also welcomes the University of Tartu as a new partner supporting the data input.
The coordinating publishing company, John Benjamins in Amsterdam, has almost finished the development of a new layout and interface that will increase the user-friendliness and extend the available search, browse, sort and filter options. The thesaurus will also be given a completely different look. Moreover, the remodeled entry form will make it easier for all scholars to submit their own publications for inclusion in TSB. We will inform the EST members as soon as the brand-new eTSB environment is fully operational.
JavierFrancoAixelá,Javier.Franco@ua.es
A few figures as of May 2021
Language of entries (not exhaustive)
Main subjects (not exhaustive)
Distribution by format
Prospects and comments
BITRA has grown in 2021 at a similar rate to 2020. At this pace, by the end of 2021 BITRA should comprise ca. 87,000 entries, with about 8,700 of them (10%) mined for impact.
More noteworthy figures:
1) With 47,055 abstracts, over 55% of BITRA entries (over 73% for the 2001-2021 period) are covered in this very important regard.
2) A total of 8,478 documents (10% of the records) have been mined for their citations. The over 120,000 resulting citations and reviews assigned, including 32,357 (38%) entries with at least 1 citation to them detected, make BITRA a powerful tool for bibliometrics in our interdiscipline.
Dictatorships have offered rich pickings for translation scholars since the early years of our discipline. Whether understood in the strict autocratic sense of absolute government by a strongman leader, or more broadly to include repressive regimes in general, they offer ample opportunities to study the complex textual transits that occur when closed literary and political systems attempt to negotiate the admission of cultural products from outside. Indeed, it would not be unfair to suggest that translation scholars rather like dictatorships. They dignify our field by providing clear-cut examples of how translations innovate stale repertoires (cf. Evan-Zohar, 1990), and of their power to challenge and subvert. Moreover, in what is often portrayed as a Manichean confrontation between the forces of darkness and light, translators are seen as the heralds of freedom and democratic values, heroically battling to ensure that the conduits of information remain open, sometimes risking their livelihoods, or even their lives, in the process.
Translation and Translanguaging in Multilingual Contexts
Translationandlinguistics
Edited by: Laurent Gautier, Michael Schreiber and Simon Varga
Volume 13, no 1 (2020)
The relationship between linguistics on the one hand and translation studies on the other hand has been raised many times over the course of the last decades. Since its establishment as a discipline in the wake of James Holmes’ seminal article “The name and nature of translation studies” in 1972, the relationships between translation studies and so-called “related” disciplines have been subject to intense debate. This is the case, among others, of the relationship between translation studies and linguistics. It is against this backdrop that this issue of trans-kom explores different perspectives on three major issues at the intersection of translation studies
and linguistics: firstly, the general linguistic and cultural categories involved in the translation process; secondly, historiographical and historicizing approaches to translated texts, especially when it comes to language policy; and, thirdly, the language industries and the technological approaches to language and translation they represent.
Translation and Interpreting Studies
Translation and the cultural Cold War
Edited by: Esmaeil Haddadian-Moghaddam and Giles Scott-Smith
Volume 15, no 3 (2020)
In the 2017 call for this special issue on “Translation and the cultural Cold War,” we posed the following questions (reproduced here in an abridged form) as possible topics for research:
– What roles did translators, editors, and publishers play in the cultural Cold War?
– In what ways did translators, editors, and publishers contribute to the construction of an image of the Cold War’s key actors in their environments?
– What roles did the allegiances of the translators, editors, and publishers play in the cultural Cold War, and what do they reveal about agency in translation?
– How did the cultural Cold War inform, shape, or transform the field of cultural production in each context?
– To what extent did the cultural Cold War contribute to the development of the publishing industry in the nonaligned/postcolonial countries?
– What has been the legacy of the cultural Cold War in the non-aligned/postcolonial countries?
– Can the practice of translation explain differences in the ways in which the cultural Cold War was waged in Europe and in other parts of the world?
What inspired the call was the observation that there is a potentially rich area for dialog, collaboration and interdisciplinary research between translation studies, Cold War history and cultural diplomacy scholarship that has remained almost untapped. The aim was to combine these interests in order to investigate in greater detail how the theory and practice of
translation were used during the Cold War for cultural/intellectual dissemination not only in the Western context but also beyond the transatlantic region. From our respective fields of research in translation studies and the cultural Cold War, a term that refers to various efforts, often clandestine, undertaken by both the superpowers to “win hearts and minds” (see Iber 2019 for a very useful overview), we saw an opportunity to establish a dialog across disciplines, which in turn resulted in issuing a call for this special issue. We understand that not every question posed above has been answered, but, as the first step toward interdisciplinary research and as a response to a recent call in translation studies to “expand outwards” (Bassnett and Johnston 2019: 187), we hope this issue opens space for a continuing exchange between scholars interested in exploring this promising field.
Several indicators seem to suggest that, through nearly six decades of development, Cognitive Translation Studies (CTS) may be taking shape as an autonomous field of study. The main challenges ahead seem to be building sounder theoretical models and carrying out more rigorous methodological scrutiny. These two strands converge as central themes in the 11 contributions to this special issue of LANS-TTS. To provide a context for theoretical modelling and to frame critical discussions of the methods included in this volume, we first trace the present landscape of CTS and how it evolved so as to test Holmes’ criteria for disciplines: founding new channels of communication and sharing a “disciplinary utopia”. The contributions are arranged into four thematic categories as applied to CTS, namely scientometrics, framing or reframing our field, the reliability and validity of popular research methods, and new methods or novel approaches. This closes with a call to reflect on some fundamental issues on the next steps of humankind regarding communication, with ever-growing societal demands and expectations that call for refreshing our notions of translation in the context of increasingly diversified forms of multilectal mediated communication.
This piece introduces a lifespan perspective on cognitive changes associated with sustained practice of simultaneous interpreting. First, I briefly describe the elevated demands posed by this activity in training and work settings. Second, I argue that a broad lifespan perspective on it requires tracking psychobiological reconfigurations in the preparation for, course of, and withdrawal from sustained professional practice. Third, I summarize the core foci and findings of three articles addressing each of those stages. To conclude, I propose that the field’s ongoing agenda should gravitate towards more ageand experience-sensitive models and practices.
Babel
APTIF 9 - Realityvs.Illusion
From Morse code to machine translation
Edited by: Frans De Laet. In-kyoung Ahn and Joong-chol Kwak
Volume 66, no 4/5 (2020)
This special issue includes the conference proceedings from the ninth Asia Pacific Translation and Interpretation Forum held
in Seoul, South Korea in July 2019. The title of the Forum was “Illusion vs. Reality: from Morse code to Machine Translation”.
Atelier de Traduction
Écologieettraduction,écologiedela traduction
Edited by: Fabio Regattin
Volume 33-34 (2020)
Ce dossier thématique d’Atelier de traduction propose de croiser deux concepts apparemment assez éloignés, la traduction d’un côté et l’écologie de l’autre. Si la polysémie du premier terme a été depuis longtemps soulignée dans la littérature traductologique, le deuxième semble également se prêter à confusion, puisque, s’il définit à l’origine la science qui étudie les relations entre les êtres vivants et leur milieu (« écologie scientifique »), il est de plus en plus utilisé pour désigner les différents mouvements qui insistent sur l’importance de la protection de l’environnement (« écologie politique »).
Partons de la deuxième acception: face à des dérèglements climatiques de plus en plus visibles, de plus en plus violents, et dont l’origine anthropique est désormais incontestable, le discours écologique prend une ampleur croissante, aussi bien dans des espaces physiques que sur la Toile –une visibilité accrue qui entraîne dans son sillon un risque de polarisation de l’opinion publique (climatoscepticisme, souverainisme environnemental de certains leaders politiques…). Une prise de position indispensable à ce sujet nous vient, dans le domaine de la traductologie, d’un livre récent de Michael Cronin (2017), où le chercheur irlandais introduit le terme « eco-translation » en référence à « toute forme de traduction qui ferait face de façon délibérée aux défis liés aux changements écologiques d’origine anthropique ». La traductologie et la traduction ont en effet un rôle important à jouer dans le discours environnementaliste; leur action peut prendre la forme aussi bien de l’analyse de pratiques discursives et traductives appartenant au domaine écologique, que de l’exemple – celui du parcours d’un traducteur, d’une traductrice, qui ferait du respect de l’environnement un des piliers de son activité. Trois contributions
recueillies dans ce dossier approchent l’écologie suivant l’un de ces deux axes.
Traduire
Lesartsduspectacle
Edited by: Noëlle Brunel, Lydia Salazar Carrasco, Émilie Syssau, and David Wilson
Volume 243 (2020)
Est-il possible et nécessaire de traduire les arts du spectacle ? Vaste question à laquelle ce numéro tentera d’apporter des réponses, sans doute incomplètes, mais toujours passionnées et argumentées. Jugez-en vous-même.
The Interpreter and Translator Trainer Ergonomics
Edited by: Gys-Walt van Egdom, Patrick Cadwell, Hendrik Kockaert and Winibert Segers
Volume 14, no 4 (2020)
The introductory article illustrates how ergonomics has come to occupy a prominent place in translation and interpreting studies. It reviews the studies that have been carried out in recent years to measure physical, cognitive and organisational conditions within the language industry. It is argued that, despite the growing awareness of the need to develop and teach sustainable practices
within the classroom (see EMT Expert Group 2017), only scant attention has been paid to ergonomics in translator and interpreter training. This article seeks to map out the (largely unchartered) territory of ergonomics in translator and interpreter training and provide an overview of the contributions to this Special Issue of ITT.
Translation Studies,
Translation in Ireland: Historical and ContemporaryPerspectives.
Edited by: Guest editors: Rióna Ní Fhrighil, Anne O’Connor and Michelle Milan
Volume 13, no 2 (2020)
The Republic of Ireland, along with Belarus, Finland, Kosovo, Malta and Norway, is one of Europe’s six officially bilingual states; Belgium, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Luxembourg and the Swiss Confederation are officially multilingual. Unlike other European states, however, official bilingualism in Ireland is not a reflection of ethnic diversity. Indeed, as Hans-Christian Oeser has observed of the co-existence of two different languages and literatures in the Irish context, “Alone in Europe it boasts of two distinct literatures as selfexpressions of one and the same people” (2000, 29). In light of Ireland’s long colonial past which led to almost complete Anglicization of the country, followed by commitments to language revitalization and official bilingualism once the Irish Free State’s political independence was secured in 1922, and the subsequent introduction in the Republic of Ireland of The Official Languages Act 2003, it is understandable that this bilingual dichotomy often frames discussions of translation in Ireland. This special issue, however, reframes this discussion to take into account the interaction between the national context and international and global flows. Indeed, the reality of the transnational global context unsettles any immutable conceptualization of “translation” as an activity or as an end product pertaining to one specific location. So although the title Translation in Ireland may appear straightforward, a brief discussion of each term indicates how the articles in this issue, in aggregate, disrupt the apparent simplicity of the title in interesting and productive ways.
Meta Journal des traducteurs Translators’ Journal
New ContextsinDiscourseAnalysisfor TranslationandInterpretation
Edited by: María Calzada Pérez and Jeremy Munday
Volume 65, no 1, 2020
This issue of Meta draws on the presentations given at the symposium on discourse analysis and translation/interpretation organised by the University Jaume I in Castellón, Spain, and held at the University of Alcalá de Henares in November 2018. The original papers presented in that forum have been supplemented by other thematically relevant contributions to create a volume that complements and enhances other recent collections around the topic. The results provide an opportunity to take stock and to examine new contexts and directions in discourse analysis applied to translation studies. It is one of a series of publications in recent years that have sought to highlight the role of discourse analysis in helping to uncover and explain meanings in source and target texts. This goes all the way back to the collected volume edited by Baker, Olohan, et al. (2010), inspired by a special panel of the IATIS conference held in Melbourne in 2009 in honour of Ian Mason. New contexts and new methods are central to this issue.
Focusing on the Spanish language, this contribution aims to introduce the phenomenon of phraseological variation, presenting, on the basis of the studies carried out in the context of Hispanic linguistics, the theoretical aspects, the quantitative frequency of the variations and the phenomenon of geolinguistic or diatopic variation. The difficulty that phraseological translation represents is pointed out emphasizing the fact that this type of translation is not impossible and that the user should be able to count on phraseological tools and databases that will allow to find phraseological equivalents in other languages before thinking about using recurrent translation techniques.
CULTUS
Mediatingnarrativesofmigration
Edited by: Raffaela Merlini and Christina Schäffner
Volume 13 (2020)
Rather than providing a unifying framework for its diverse theoretical and methodological applications, this contribution attempts to explore the territory of narrative by tracking the routes of a number of germinal core-constructs that have spread across disciplines and fields of activity. Taking migration and migration policy models as our “air-view map”, the first leg of the journey follows along the paths of multiculturalism, interculturality and transculturality, discussing the socio-political implications of these conceptual approaches and their repercussions on the provision of translation and interpreting services. Subsequently, the epistemological construct of narrative is observed from the vantage point of socio-narrative theory as applied to translation and interpreting studies, with a specific focus on the identity-construction dynamics that emerge when mediating migrants’ personal stories that clash with public (institutionally acceptable) narratives. Wandering through the theoretical domains of positioning, voice, empathy and media cross-genre recontextualization practices, the contribution ends with one of the many possible narratives of the collection of papers in this volume.
Journal of Audiovisual Translation
PerspectivesonComplexUnderstandings
Edited by: Jan Pedersen and Anna Matamala
Volume 3, No 2 (2020)
This special ssue contains a peer-reviewed selection of papers presented at Media for all 8: Complex understandings, a conference which took place in Stockholm in 2019. This introduction links the 15 articles included in this special issue to the conference theme, which is also the theme of this volume: complex understandings. The ultimate aim of the research presented here is to throw light on the various and complex perspectives, processes, views and agents involved in audiovisual translation and media accessibility. The introductory article highlights the main points of the different papers, and it also organises the contributions according to the various perspectives they take: product-based studies, process-based studies, trainingbased studies, user-based studies and policy-based studies. Overall, this volume offers a thorough overview of state-of-theart research in audiovisual translation and media accessibility.
La main de Thôt: Théories, enjeux et pratiques de la traduction
Traduire la chanson
Edited by: Anne Cayuela
Volume 8 (2020)
Les lecteurs de ce volume auront peut-être oublié (ou ignoraient jusque-là) que la chanson Trois petites notes de musique est tirée du film Une aussi longue absence, d’Henri Colpi, qui obtient la palme d’or en 1961, ex-aequo avec Viridiana de Luis Buñuel. Ces paroles, écrites par Colpi luimême, sont indissociables de la belle musique de Georges Delerue1, et renvoient à l’impact d’une chanson2 sur notre mémoire et sur la fragilité de cette dernière:
Trois petites notes de musique ont plié boutique au creux du souvenir
C’en est fini d’ leur tapage, elles tournent la page et vont s’endormir
Mais un jour sans crier gare
Elles vous reviennent en mémoire…
Les mots s’effacent progressivement, laissant la mélodie prendre le dessus.
Même des paroles « sans rien d’ sublime », lovées au fond de notre mémoire, resteront gravées à jamais dans notre cœur et seront
prêtes à ressurgir pour peu qu’on en fredonne la musique.
3Ce détour par ces trois petites notes de musique n’a d’autre dessein que celui de rappeler que dans une chanson, les paroles ne sont finalement pas si essentielles que cela : « parfois on change un mot, une phrase / Et quand on est à cours d’idée / on fait: / La la la la la la… » chante Charles Trenet dans l’Ame des poètes. Dans un tout autre registre, le succès planétaire de la chanson Jerusalema, chant religieux zoulou venu d’Afrique du Sud remis au goût du jour par un jeune producteur sudafricain Master KG et interprétée par la chanteuse Nomcebo Zikode, devenue virale après le confinement du printemps 2020, en est bien la preuve. Quelles sont les raisons d’un tel succès alors que l’immense majorité du public en ignore le sens ? Sontce les accents de la voix profonde et solennelle, son rythme entraînant ou son tempo dansant ? Nul besoin de comprendre le sens pour être happé par la joie profonde qui se dégage de cette chanson. Ce n’est que dans un deuxième temps que la curiosité pourra pousser l’auditeur à prendre connaissance d’une traduction écrite circulant sur le web. Mais revenons à ces trois petites notes de musique évoquées plus haut. Que se passe-t-il lorsqu’on les contraint au silence ?
Cadernos de literatura em Tradução
Especial Literatura Nórdica
Edited by: Guilherme da Silva Braga
Volume 23 (2020)
É com enorme satisfação que apresento aos leitores dos Cadernos de literatura em tradução esse número especial dedicado à literatura dos países nórdicos. A ideia de levar a cabo um projeto nesses moldes remonta ao início de 2015, quando meu envolvimento com a tradução de literatura sueca e em particular norueguesa deu sinais bastante claros de haver se transformado em uma atividade regular. No ano seguinte, John Milton acolheu generosamente a minha proposta de um número especial, e após a divulgação da chamada feita em 2017 fui surpreendido
por uma quantidade de material que eu jamais havia imaginado receber: foram três dezenas de textos individuais que apresentam (sob a forma de tradução) ou discutem (sob a forma de artigo) a obra de nada menos que dezoito autores diferentes. Esse abrangente panorama da literatura nórdica – que vai de obras clássicas a textos contemporâneos, da poesia à escrita acadêmica e das narrativas folclóricas aos textos filosóficos, com passagens por Noruega, Suécia, Dinamarca, Finlândia e Islândia –foi o resultado do trabalho individual ou conjunto de um total de 21 tradutores e pesquisadores acadêmicos que se encontram nas mais variadas etapas de uma carreira nas Letras, sem os quais o volume jamais teria saído do plano das ideias. Foi graças aos esforços dessas pessoas todas – de principiantes que enfim tomaram coragem para embarcar na aventura tradutória a profissionais experientes que viram na chamada uma oportunidade para dar continuidade ao trabalho que já vinham realizando dentro ou fora da academia – que o volume agora publicado pôde tornar-se uma realidade.
JoSTrans
Translation and Plurisemiotic Practices
Edited by: Francis Mus and Sarah Neelsen
Volume 35 (2021)
The publication of the latest JoSTrans thematic issue is always something to be celebrated. But to do so at the close of one of the most difficult years many of us will have known represents all the more significant an achievement. 2020 has been a year of unprecedented challenge, but it has also been a year in which we have witnessed the emergence of new ways of working and new ways of thinking, and this is evident in the fresh and forward-looking content we commit to you in this latest round of publications.
This thematic issue, edited by Francis Mus and Sarah Neelsen, and entitled ‘Translation and plurisemiotic practices’ is both a salient appraisal of what has come before and also an important glimpse into the future of the field. In these times of unprecedented difficulty, the production of this special issue is testament to the continued commitment of colleagues to the field. Together with detailed introductions from the editors Francis Mus and Sarah Neelsen, this issue engages with translation in its widest understanding, and across eight articles includes contributions on translation and its multiple connections with art and visual culture, performance art, and live performance in its various forms.
Edited by: Aura E. Navarro and Paula Andrea Montoya-Arango
Volume 14, no 1 (2021)
La importancia de los medios de comunicación en la configuración social, política y cultural de nues-tras sociedades, hoy y en el pasado, es evidente. Los medios de comunicación son objeto de estudio de muchas disciplinas, así como tema de conversación en diversos espacios sociales; es un campo de estudio que apasiona y dibuja una faceta importante del ser humano en relación con su contexto. La prensa, medio de comunicación que se ajusta con gran flexibilidad a diversos formatos, continúa siendo esencial para abrir lugares de reflexión y delinear la opinión pública. Este último rasgo es todavía más relevante en entornos globalizados y, en su dimensión inevitablemente multilingüe (todo periódico actualmente bebe de fuentes diversas, incluidas fuentes extranjeras), vuelve la traducción una actividad de primer orden. Cualquier medio de comunicación debería considerar el valor agregado de contar en su equipo de trabajo con traductores e intérpretes competentes en traducción como complementos esenciales a la labor de sus periodistas. El flujo de información no da espera y cada vez son más los periódicos o medios de información digital (general o espe-cializada) que difunde (“globaliza”) su información en tiempo real.
Interacciones entreimágenes,textosy sonidos en traducción
Edited by: Rocío García Jiménez, Francisca García Luque and Nieves Jiménez Carra
Volume 24 (2020)
El dosier que a continuación presentamos recoge ocho trabajos de investigación que comparten una característica: abordan el análisis de la traducción de textos en los que conviven elementos lingüísticos, elementos icónicos y a veces elementos acústicos. Se trata, por tanto, de áreas más o menos afines en las que la naturaleza de los textos objeto de análisis exige a los investigadores sobrepasar los límites de la palabra y considerar su combinación con otro tipo de signos para dar cuenta del proceso traductor que subyace en todos ellos.
Hermeneus
Divagacionessobrelenguas,interpretación e historia
Edited by: Jesús Baigorri Jalón
Volume 22 (2020)
Interpretar –traducir en general– consiste en realizar una tarea, habitualmente compleja, que se viene practicando de manera espontánea desde tiempo inmemorial, a saber, decir en una lengua casi lo mismo que en otra (Eco, 2003). Es cierto que los entresijos de sus procesos –el cómo– y también de sus productos –el qué, para qué o para quién– se han ido diseccionando de manera cada vez más minuciosa, en buena medida a causa de la incorporación relativamente reciente de las profesiones de intérprete y traductor al complicado territorio de las disciplinas académicas, a menudo marcado por lo que Freud, refiriéndose a asuntos relativos a la psiquiatría, llamó «el narcisismo de las pequeñas diferencias» (1930: 474). Sin embargo, la línea divisoria entre la interpretación oral –o gestual– y la traducción no está clara a lo largo de la historia, ni siquiera en nuestros días, ya que hay quien practica ambas actividades y aun otras a la vez. Lo que está claro es que muchas de las traducciones escritas que se hicieron en el pasado trasladaron textos escritos entre dos idiomas a través de una enunciación verbal –traducción a la vista–realizada por un intérprete capaz de entender el texto de partida y de ir leyéndolo en el idioma de llegada para que alguien tomara nota escrita de sus
TRANS
palabras. Así hicieron los trujamanes judíos que tradujeron obras del árabe al castellano vernáculo en la llamada Escuela de Toledo en la época de Alfonso X (Foz, 1998), donde fue precisa una amalgama de lo oral y de lo escrito para que tuviera lugar el paso de un idioma a otro o a otros.
Vita Traductiva
Traduirelesvoixdelanature/Translating the Voices of Nature
Edited by: Kristiina Taivalkoski-Shilov and Bruno Poncharal
Volume 11 (2021)
Following the ecocritical shift in the humanities and social sciences, Translation Studies is beginning to explore the ethical considerations for translation of reexamining humans’ relationship with nature. Nonetheless, few scholars have studied how particular voices of fauna, flora, natural forces and different ecosystems are represented from one language to another, and how these voices of nature can be silenced, misread, or creatively recreated in translation. Drawing on several linguistic contexts (Canada, England, Finland, France, Japan, Poland and Switzerland), the essays in this volume examine a variety of issues (natural imaginaries, animality and subjectivity, intentionality, anthropomorphism, rewriting). Overall, they confirm the importance of reconceptualizing translation to include non-human and human communication, and sketch out the contours of a new, ecocritical translation practice.
Translation and Translanguaging in Multilingual Contexts
by: Ángeles Carreres, María NoriegaSánchez and Lucía Pintado Gutiérrez
Volume 7, no 1 (2021)
As we enter the second decade of the 21st century, the challenges and possibilities surrounding the role of translation in language learning appear both in some ways similar and rather different from what they were twenty or even ten years ago. Much progress has been made in integrating translation as a key component in language education. In recent years, an increased interest in the multilingual dimension has offered further opportunities for reflection and experimentation around the role translation can play as part of plurilingual pedagogies. At the same time, some of the old misconceptions have lingered in some quarters and continue to hold back further advances. The articles in this volume set out to explore the possibilities that open up, and the challenges that arise, as translation transitions from a relatively marginal place towards becoming normalised as an integral part of language teaching practice. A number of contributions foreground plurilingual approaches and seek to articulate the place of translation within them. It has been our intention as editors to bring together a variety of perspectives and methodological approaches, and to include both the secondary and the higher education settings across countries in Europe and North America.
Perspectives
Legalterminologyandphraseologyin translation
Edited by: Fernando Prieto Ramos
Volume 29, no 2 (2021)
As central aspects of legal translation practice and research, legal terminology and phraseology are a prominent area of inquiry in Legal Translation Studies (LTS). The introductory paper reviews the varying conditions and challenges of dealing with conceptual incongruity in inter-systemic legal translation, on the one hand, and the implications of ensuring harmonization and consistency in multilingual legal texts through institutional translation, on the other. These endeavors are compounded by the significant hybridity and polysemy of legal terminology, as multiple intersections co-exist between legal orders, legal fields and other specialized domains, and between legal and general language. As illustrated by this special issue, corpusbased methodologies have proven particularly fruitful approaches to investigating these issues. They support the description of terminological and phraseological features of legal genres, as well as the acceptability analysis required to make translation decisions and to elaborate lexicographical resources in line with legal and institutional translators’ needs.
The Interpreter and Translator Trainer
Latest advancements in audiovisual translation education.
Edited by: Alejandro Bolaños-GarcíaEscribano, Jorge Díaz-Cintas and Serenella Massidda
Volume 15, no 1 (2021)
The consumption of audiovisual content, from the more traditional animations, documentaries, movies, and TV shows to the more recent online user-generated content found on social media platforms, including video games, has grown exponentially over the last few decades. The omnipresence of screens in society has led to transformations in audiences’ watching habits, now impatient to enjoy their programmes as soon as possible and inclined to binge watch. Recent technological advances in the production of
specialist audiovisual translation (AVT) software and web-based applications have paved the way for further changes and enhancements in the ways professionals localise audiovisual content and in the nature of the services provided. This special issue sheds light on the current teaching and learning practices, methodologies and issues encountered by translator trainers specialised in AVT, with particular emphasis on pedagogical innovation, media accessibility, and translation technology.
Edited by: Peter I. De Costa, Joseph SungYul Park and Lionel Wee
Volume 40, no 2 (2021)
Under the burgeoning influence of neoliberalism (Block et al. 2012; Holborow 2015; Piller and Cho 2013), several ideological trends have converged to reframe language learning as a project of entrepreneurial self-development. One of these is enterprise culture (Du Gay 1996; Keat and Abercrombie 1991; Ong 2006; Wee 2011), in which characteristics such as initiative, innovation, self-reliance, resilience, and the ability to respond quickly to competition are celebrated. Another is the theory of human capital (Foucault 2008; Holborow 2012; Park 2016; van Droon 2014), which considers the skills, competencies, and aptitudes of an individual as capital that must be carefully managed and developed so as to maximize its value in the market. A third ideological trend is the commodification of language (Cameron 2005; Heller 2003, 2010; Muth and del Percio 2017; Sharma and Phyak 2017), in which language is loosened from its traditional role as a marker of ethnonational identity to be reimagined as a flexible economic resource that can be mobilized for profit.
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European Society for Translation Studies
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The EST Newsletter is published twice a year, in May and November. It is basically a vehicle for communication between EST members and a catalyst for action, rather than a journal. It provides information on EST activities and summarizes some of the information available on the EST website, the EST Twitter account and Facebook group – you are invited to go to those sites for information that is more specific and up-to-date. The Newsletter reports on research events and presents suggestions on EST matters and research issues. All comments and suggestions from readers are welcome. All correspondence relating to the Newsletter should be sent to: secretarygeneralest@gmail.com
