December
2007
(The short notes and
comments associated with the items presented here are personal attempts to
contribute useful information. In some cases, I have reproduced partly an
abstract or presentation provided by the author or publisher. In others, the
comments were made by me after reading the items. I acknowledge the subjective
nature of my comments, take responsibility for errors and will gladly insert
corrections at the request of authors. D. Gile)
BOOKS
Díaz-Cintas, Jorge and Aline Remael. 2007. Audiovisual Translation: Subtitling. Manchester: St Jerome.ISBN 978-1-900650-95-3
Pöchhacker, Franz.
2007. Interpreter Translator Teaching Research: Miriam Shlesinger – translation
scholar. In Pöchhacker, Franz, Arnt
Lykke Jakobsen & Inger M. Mees (eds). 5-22.
* Biographical note, bibliography
Toury, Gideon. 2007. What can the Bible tell us about
translation in antiquity? In Pöchhacker, Franz, Arnt Lykke Jakobsen
& Inger M. Mees (eds). 25-39.
* Interesting reflections on
translation in the old testament, more specifically on words used to denoted
translation, translating or translators, the presentation of parts of biblical
texts as products of translation, accounts of situations where translation was
allegedly exercised, textual phenomena in the text which are singular and might
be explained through a ‘translation hypothesis’.
Mackintosh, Jennifer. 2007. Conference interpreting as a profession and how it got that way.
In Pöchhacker, Franz, Arnt Lykke Jakobsen & Inger M. Mees (eds). 41-52.
Setton, Robin. 2007. Staying
relevant: Interpreting in the information age. In Pöchhacker,
Franz, Arnt Lykke Jakobsen & Inger M. Mees (eds).
53-72.
* (see CIRIN Bulletin n°35)
Harmer, Jacolyn. 2007. Relay interpretation: a preliminary
study. In Pöchhacker, Franz, Arnt
Lykke Jakobsen & Inger M. Mees (eds). 73-87.
* (see CIRIN Bulletin n°35)
Moser-Mercer, Barbara. 2007. Global cognition: Training a new breed of interpreter trainers.
In Pöchhacker, Franz, Arnt Lykke Jakobsen & Inger M. Mees (eds). 89-101
* Two parts: one a general presentation of the socio-constructivist
learning approach, another comparing Asian and ‘Western’ students.
Morris, Ruth.
2007. Dies, Attard or Lockerbie? Enlightened
and unenlightened judicial views of interpreters in English-speaking legal systems.
In Pöchhacker, Franz, Arnt Lykke Jakobsen & Inger M. Mees (eds). 103-119.
* Examples of linguistically aware voices from judges, and of various
cases where interpreting was not provided under professionally satisfying
conditions and follow-ups.
Pöchhacker, Franz.
2007. Giving access - or not: A developing country perspective on healthcare
interpreting. In Pöchhacker, Franz, Arnt Lykke Jakobsen
& Inger M. Mees (eds). 121-137.
* About the situation in Viennese
hospitals. Examples of routine miscommunication.
Slayter Helen and Terry Chesher. 2007. Talking about accuracy: Interpreters’
understanding of a key principle of professional ethics. In Pöchhacker,
Franz, Arnt Lykke Jakobsen & Inger M. Mees (eds).
139-152
* An analysis of the responses of interpreter-respondents to a survey on
how they see their role in terms of accuracy.
Shlesinger, Yael. 2007. Vicarious traumatization among
interpreters who work with torture survivors and their therapists. In Pöchhacker, Franz, Arnt Lykke Jakobsen & Inger M. Mees (eds). 153-172.
* “Vicarious traumatization”
(VT) refers to Secondary exposure to traumatic material, which the author
expected to find in interpreters working for therapists treating survivors of
torture. In her questionnaire-based survey, the author did not find a higher
rate of VT in interpreters who work with such survivors in comparison to the
general population, or in interpreters who experienced trauma in the past.
Neither did she find a correlation between the number of hours of work and VT. She
did find more burnout in interpreters with past experience of trauma and in
interpreters who received supervision. These somewhat surprising results could
be due to the sampling problems; the sample was small and included only one
interpreter who worked full time. Perhaps VT comes in above a certain threshold
of working hours?
Pym, Anthony.
2007. On Shlesinger’s proposed equalizing universal
for interpreting. In Pöchhacker, Franz, Arnt Lykke Jakobsen
& Inger M. Mees (eds). 175-190.
* On Shlesinger’s 1989 MA thesis which shows a
centralizing effect between oral and literate features of source speeches in
the interpreters’ rendition. Explains and comments on it.
Turner, H. Graham. 2007. Exploring inter-subdisciplinary
alignment in interpreting studies: Sign language interpreting at conferences.
In Pöchhacker, Franz, Arnt Lykke Jakobsen & Inger M. Mees (eds). 191-216.
* Report on a small-scale questionnaire British Sign Language
interpreters in
Jakobsen, Arnt Lykke, Kristian T.H Jensen & Inger M. Mees. 2007. Comparing modalities: Idioms as a
case in point.
In Pöchhacker, Franz, Arnt Lykke Jakobsen & Inger M. Mees (eds). 217-249.
* The authors studied the processing of 12 English idiomatic expressions
occurring in two different texts which were translated into Danish by five professional
translators working under no time constraint, and sight-translated by five
professional interpreters who had been asked to carry out the task at roughly
the speed at which they would operate in a professional situation. Following
are some of the findings of the experiment:
p.231-2 Each of the translators
and each of the interpreters spent more time processing the sentences with
idioms than the other sentences except for one sentence without an idiom where
there were two complex names with an odd spelling, initials and punctuation
marks. Translators took on average 40% longer to translate such sentences (8%
to 110%). Interpreters took on average 30% longer (21% to 50%).
p. 234 The translators’ priorities in strategic
choices were found to be the following: non-cognate solution, then direct
transfer, then paraphrase. Interpreters preferred paraphrase, then non-cognate
solutions, then direct transfer.
p. 235 contrary to expectations, there were twice as many false cognates
in the translators’ than in the interpreters’ renditions.
The hypothesis that the first impulse was for idiom-for-idiom
translation was supported only for translators, not for interpreters. The
investigators did not find more occurrences of direct translation in the
interpreters’ than in the translators’ renditions, nor more false cognates in
the interpreters’ than in the translators’ renditions.
p. 238 Absolute
processing time was much shorter for interpreters, and idioms delayed
production in interpreters more than in translators
p. 238 the range of individual variation was “huge”
p. 241 The findings suggest that interpreters
are more inclined to accept direct transfer options than translators.
p.
p.243 Somewhat surprising…
instances of direct transfer took interpreters almost twice as long to produce
as other solution types. Possible explanation: this was a last resort solution,
adopted reluctantly when a better solution was not found.
p. 243 The high frequency with which
interpreters immediately opted for paraphrase solutions could well be
understood as the effect of more systematic cognate avoidance.
p.245 the findings by Gibbs et al (1989) that processing of
non-compositional idioms was slower… appear to become overridden by stronger, interlingual factors affecting translators and
interpreters…. This suggests that differences discoverable in monolingual reading
and comprehension experiments cannot be simply transferred to interlingual translation – This comment echoes Setton’s thoughts (see above (DG)
Dragsted, Barbara & Inge Gorm Hansen. 2007. Speaking your translation: Exploiting synergies between translation
and interpreting. In Pöchhacker, Franz, Arnt Lykke Jakobsen
& Inger M. Mees (eds). 251-274.
* A political speech given at the European Union was given to 2
translators who were asked to translate the first 634 words and sight-translate
the next 655 words. Two interpreters were asked to sight translate the first
635 words and to simultaneously interpret the rest of the speech. This paper
reports on the sight translation and translation part of the experiment. Gazing
data was collected for both groups. Translog was also
used.
Gaze data from interpreters
show that they focused only on the paragraph they are translating, whereas the
translators gaze scanned other areas of the source text as well. Thus,
interpreters seem to have a more local reading and comprehension process than
the translators, who adopt a more global strategy.
The
interpreters sight-translated dramatically faster than the translators.
There were strikingly fewer pauses of 2 seconds and longer in the interpreters’
renditions.
There were fewer hesitations in the oral mode
(as opposed to the written mode) in both translators even though working orally
felt unfamiliar to them.
Interpreters turned out to be
less literal than translators.
In the sight translation mode,
both translators translated more freely than in the written mode.
Translators did not perform
significantly better in written translation despite the fact that they spent
more time on the task.
Kurz, Ingrid.
2007. The fictional interpreter. In Pöchhacker,
Franz, Arnt Lykke Jakobsen & Inger M. Mees (eds).
277-289.
* An analysis of and reflection on the way fictional interpreters are
portrayed in four works of fiction.
Henriksen, Line. 2007. The poetic interpreter and
the interpreting poet: Chiasmi of translation. In Pöchhacker, Franz, Arnt Lykke Jakobsen & Inger M. Mees (eds). 291-302.
* While the points made on poetry in this paper are not quite clear to
me (certainly because of my lack of knowledge in the field), I was interested
in the author’s ideas related to cognitive
phenomena and language availability (reference is made to the gravitational
model of linguistic availability), in particular the potential memory traces of
previous words (maintained in a proximal high-availability orbit in the model)
which act as an ‘echo’ and primers to favour certain linguistic choices in the
interpreter’s following utterances. Such phenomena, which could involve both
source-language words and structures and the interpreter’s own words and
structures, would challenge the idea of full deverbalization
between source-speech perception and target-speech reformulation.
Lee, Jieun. 2007. Telephone interpreting – seen from the
interpreters’ perspective. Interpreting 9:2. 231-252.
* An analysis of Korean telephone interpreting in
Tsuda, Mamoru. 1995. Interpreting and Translating
for Filipino suspects/Defendants in
* Not quite a recent publication, obviously, but one which is posted
here because of its originality with respect to the geographical location of
the scene and because of the interdisciplinary approach adopted by the author.
WANG Jian & YANG Bingjun. 2007. On the Opportunities for and Challenges to Court
Interpretation in
* Court interpretation is critical in guaranteeing people’s right by
ensuring his ‘presence’ when his case is tried. The increasing sensitivity to
human rights, the emergence of Civil Law System and Common Law System, the
transformation of China from a relatively closed society to an open one offer
opportunities for, meanwhile, pose unprecedented challenges to, the development
of court interpretation in China. With respect to that some suggestions are offered.
(information
contributed by Wang Binhua)
* From Sendebar,
Revista de la facultad de traducción e interpretación, Granada.
* A few more examples of papers from recent issues of this interesting
journal published by the
Judit Freixa & Elisabet Solé. 2006. Análisis lingüistico de la detección automática de neologismos léxicos. Sendebar
17. 135-147.
* About automatic extraction of neologisms from texts. A report on the work
done at the Observatori de Neologia
of the University Pompeu Fabra
in Barcelona.
Isabel García Izquierdo. 2006. El español neutro en las traducción de los
lenguajes de especialidad. Sendebar 17. 149-167.
* The author argues in favour of “International Spanish” or “Neutral
Spanish”, similar to “Global English”, in general communication and in LSP
texts, so as to achieve better communication between Spanish-speaking
countries, resist interference from English and help standardize some parts of
language use.
Ana María García Álvarez. 2006. Confusiones, aclaraciones y propuesta metodológica para el análisis de los conceptos funcionalistas de “función”
y “skopos” en la práctica de la traducción. Sendebar 17.
187-218.
* The author says that the skopos theory has
been criticized as having no ethics. She argues that this is due to confusion
in its own terminology and attempts to clarify essential terms in the theory
and to prove that underneath the apparent “relativism” it seems to defend,
there are principles governing equivalence.
Isabel Gómez Hurtado.
2006. Bilingües y estudiantes de traducción. Estudio empírico sobre su
comportamiento y sus resultados a traducir. Sendebar 17. 119-134.
* A summary of the author’s doctoral dissertation (not found in the
references). Translation of one English text into Spanish and one Spanish text
into English by Spanish-English bilinguals and by final-year translation
students was compared with several tools including Translog,
interviews and Wordsmith. Bilinguals were found to be slower than translation
students. None of them read the ST before translating, whereas more than half
of the translation students did. Bilinguals used more written documents for ad
hoc information acquisition, whereas translation students used exclusively
internet for this purpose. Translation students translated into Spanish with a
wider variety of words than bilinguals, but no similar difference was found
with respect to their vocabulary when translating into English. The general
marks given by the 3 evaluators to translation students translating into
Spanish were better than those given by them to the bilinguals, but the
bilinguals’ marks were higher for translations into English. In her general
conclusions, the author comments that the behaviour of the two groups was not
very dissimilar, that the translation students group was found to be more
homogeneous in its behaviour, but that what it had learned was not sufficient
to ensure better results.
Erika González García. 2004. Interpretación social: una necesidad
que emerge día al día. Aproximación al contexto guipuzcoano. Sendebar 15. 97-110.
* A paper on the needs in terms of
public service interpreting in the Northern part of Spain, where there
are fewer immigrants than in the South.
Juan José Martínez Sierra. 2006. La manipulación del texto: sobre la dualidad extranjerización
/ familiarización en la traducción del humor en textos audiovisuales. Sendebar 17.219-231.
* Reflections on the limits of both foreignizing
and domesticating strategies in the translation of humor
in AV products.
Roberto Mayoral Asensio. 2002. Nuevas perspectivas para la traducción audiovisual. Sendebar
13.123-140.
*
Very general, on AV translation.