Inquiries on Cultural Markers in Translation

In descriptive translation studies, the identification of cultural markers brings with it certain theoretical and methodological difficulties: the very conceptualization of the cultural marker; its subcategories, both linguistic and extra-linguistic; the appropriate procedures to carry out its identification. The present essay seeks to map the extent of these difficulties and make a number of proposals, yet to be tested in descriptive practice.

Traduire l’Ekphrasis. Le cas des Fleurs du mal de Baudelaire en Iran

Cultural exchanges between Iran and France started over three centuries ago. In spite of the strong relationship between the two countries, some books such as Les Fleurs du mal (Flowers of Evil) went unnoticed in Iranian society. In addition to the literary value of the book, we propose to study ekphrasis in Baudelaire’s poems and its translation into Persian. Its meaning being that of a general description an artwork (imaginary or real), the term ekphrasis belongs to an interdisciplinary field of literature and art where the textual challenges we face may vary from one to another. To narrow down our study, we will focus on four chosen poems that have a minimum of two published translations in Persian, thus allowing the opportunity for a comparative study. These chosen poems, “La Beauté”, “L’Invitation au voyage”, “Les Plaintes d’un Icare” and “Femmes damnées” (“Delphine et Hippolyte”) as well as our corpus translation in Persian, are being studied and analysed through Descriptive Translation Studies. The analysis focuses on the ekphrastic aspect of these poems, their translations into Persian through syntactic and semantic levels and the influence of culture and society on the translation.

Hur skapas en rebelltjej på svenska?

What’s a Rebel Girl in Swedish? On the Translation of Elena Favilli and Francesca Cavallo’s Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls Abstract: This article investigates the translation of Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls: 100 Tales of Extraordinary Women, a children’s book written and published by Elena Favilli and Francesca Cavallo in 2016. Within the framework of Gideon Toury’s Descriptive Translation Studies and Katharina Reiss’ text typology, the study focuses on the Swedish translation Godnattsagor för rebelltjejer: 100 berättelser om fantastiska kvinnor from 2017, including comparisons with the Danish, French, and Norwegian translations, with a view to discover the differences between the text versions. Analysis shows that the Swedish translation is less source-text dependent than the other translations, downplaying the fairytalization of the stories and tending to strengthen the informative component of the text. Poetic language and metaphors are less apparent in the Swedish translation, while hedging, explicitation as well as specification of time, place and chronology contribute to making the text more factual. A further finding is that more adult language is used in the Swedish translation. The article ends by summarizing the main findings and discussing a few explanations for the adaptation of the Swedish translation with regard to its target language context.

Substitution and Ellipsis in the Translation of English-Swahili Healthcare Texts

Even though substitution and ellipsis contribute to text cohesiveness just like any other cohesive device, the two grammatical cohesive devices are largely understudied. Focusing on the interplay between translation and cohesion, this study delves into the translation of substitution and ellipsis in Swahili healthcare texts. This study, theoretically anchored on Descriptive Translation Studies, set out to unravel the use of substitution and ellipsis and establish if there is any variation in the use of the two grammatical cohesive devices in the translated Swahili healthcare texts. The data used in the study is extracted from Orang’i (2020) doctoral study. Substitution and ellipsis are the basis for the manual comparison of the coupled pairs from the sample texts. The study has established that ellipsis and substitution are used sparingly in the texts. Though the use of substitution is limited, it emerged that clausal and nominal substitutions were prevalent. Equally, the use of ellipsis is almost non-existent in the Swahili healthcare texts though present in the source texts. The foregoing points to an endeavour by translators to make explicit that which is implicit in the source text and this led to the conclusion that explicitation is a norm in the translation of Swahili healthcare texts. The two cohesive devices are largely about one’s choice and can, to some extent, be avoided or minimally used. Overall, it was implied that substitution and ellipsis are not preferred cohesive devices in Swahili healthcare texts.

Is interpreting of China’s political discourse becoming more target-oriented?

Interpreting is an activity embedded in a particular socio-cultural context that underpins norms of interpreting. Adopting the descriptive translation studies approach, this study aims to find out whether the interpretation for the Chinese government by institutional interpreters is becoming more target-oriented in the decade of the 2010s in comparison with the 1990s. Through both quantitative and qualitative analyses of the Corpus of Interpreted Chinese Government Press Conferences in the 1990s and that of the 2010s, the study reveals that there is a significant increase in the total number of target-oriented shifts in the 2010s, manifested predominantly in “inserting hedges before propositional statements” and “modality shifts to attenuate ST’s categorical force.” Only minimal differences are found for the number of shifts in “explicitation of emphatic meanings,” “specification of Chinese source deictic lexis,” and “explicitation of implicit logic relations” between the two periods. The results thus indicate a general trend of becoming more target-oriented in interpreting, particularly a tendency to mitigate ST’s illocutionary force to a greater extent in the 2010s. Such changes in China’s institutional interpreting are correlated with the evolving socio-political context and the norms of institutional interpreting.

A comparative study that investigates the treatment of technical terms, acronyms and numbers in a Tsonga technical target text

In each and every translated text, there is a certain intended meaning that is being communicated to the target reader or audience in their target language, which is equivalent to what is in the source text. Nonetheless, there is still a big debate on whether a translation should follow the communicative meaning or the semantic meaning when conveying the communicated message. This article provides an analysis and application of Toury’s Descriptive Translation Studies (DTS) methodology on the treatment of technical terms, abbreviations or acronyms and numbers in a Tsonga target text. It also investigated the strategies applied by the translator to close the gap between the two languages in question (Tsonga and English), which vary significantly when we compare their instrumental value, hegemony and economic status.

Dornröschen: Шиповничек, или Спящая Красавица? Исследование перевода заглавий Часть 2 Переводческий анализ заглавий сказок братьев Гримм (на английском языке)

This article continues the linguistic investigation into titles, which was published as Part 1 in 2020. The recent paper focuses on matters of translation within a combined framework of Descriptive Translation Studies (DTS) and Skopos Theory of translation. The subject matter includes the 200 titles of the Brothers Grimm Fairy Tales (GFT) and their translation from German into British English and American English. The intended research can be taken as one way to approach the translation of titles, exemplified on a certain data set. The analysis covers in a first step linguistic approaches to those titles by checking out the techniques of translation. In a second step, the functionality of title translation in the case of the GFT titles will be briefly outlined by attempting to set an interrelationship of functions of titles and functions of translations. Lists of sources and references close-up the article. Статья трактует переводческие проблемы в рамках двух взаимосвязанных концепций — дескриптивного переводоведения (Descriptive Translation Studies — DTS) и скопос-теории перевода (Scopos Theory of Translation). Материалом для исследования послужили заглавия двухсот сказок братьев Гримм в переводе с немецкого языка на британский и американский английский. Цель автора — предложить возможный подход к переводу заголовков на достаточном массиве данных. Автор начинает с анализа переводческих приемов, использованных при передаче заглавий сказок, чтобы далее перейти к функциональности перевода заглавий на материале собрания сказок братьев Гримм и выявить взаимосвязь между функциями заголовков и функциями их переводческих аналогов.

Translation activities on oral translation and written translation

Translation activities and studies from one language to another must be carried out to understand the thoughts, ideas, culture, and knowledge of other nations who have different styles. Put translation activities can be divided into two types, namely oral translation or what is often referred to as oral translation and written translation, whereas translation studies are divided into two types, namely descriptive translation studies and translation theory studies. In the field of descriptive translation studies have two objects, namely the work of translation and the process of translation. Translation activities certainly require translation techniques or styles. Translation techniques are procedures or procedures for analyzing and classifying translation equivalents from source languages to target languages and can be used in a variety of lingual units. In translation activities, the use of techniques used by translators is not an important thing. The most important thing for a translator is the technique chosen can fulfill the purpose of the translation. Among the objectives of the translation, activity as a communication tool that connects the writer in the source language with the reader in the target language, and the translator as the mediator or the liaison of both.

Irlanda para lectores francoparlantes: "Les gants de Limerick", de María Edgeworth

As the founder of the Big House novel, Maria Edgeworth occupies a privileged place in Anglo-Irish studies. This article aims to analyze the translation of Edgeworth's tale "The Limerick Gloves" (Popular Tales 1804) from the viewpoint of Itamar Even-Zohar's polysystem theory and Gideon Toury's Descriptive Translation Studies (DTS). This story is one of Edgeworth's Rebellion narratives and is interestingly placed between Edgeworth's bestseller Castle Rackrent and her so-called Irish novels. Here we deal with the text published in Bibliothèque Britannique by the brothers Pictet, who had already versioned into French many stories penned by Edgeworth.

Food Name Translation Practice: A Case Study of Indonesian – English Menus

This paper analyzed the translation practice on chained hotel restaurant menus, especially on Indonesian traditional menu into English. The translation of food names requires translators to consider both the cultural associations embedded in the names, their meaning and function in the source language (SL) as well as the translatability of the terms in the target language (TL). Employing Descriptive Translation Studies, 33 Indonesian traditional food names from five hotel restaurants in Surabaya are analyzed in order to reveal the common practice of Indonesian traditional food name (SL) into English (TL). Out of 33 data, there are 21 traditional food name translation compared and elaborated using Descriptive Translation Studies approach. The translation procedures identified then are grouped based on Kwiecinski. The result indicated that exoticizing procedures only constitute of 9.5%, while rich explicatory procedures accounts for 61.9%. Further, recognized exoticism procedures was found in one data or 4.8%, and assimilative procedures are applied in five data or 23.8%. Thus, the most common practice in translating Indonesian traditional food names into English is mostly by describing the appearance of food completed by a list of side dishes and condiments. Thus, there is an attempt to generalize the unique feature of traditional food which may help target readers to recognize the food. However, the long information provided rarely explains the taste, and weights more into the serving appearance of the traditional food, reducing the potent of introducing the identity of Indonesian traditional food.