This textbook provides an accessible introduction to the field of translation for students of other disciplines and readers who are not translators. It provides students outside the translation ...profession with a greater awareness of, and appreciation for, what goes into translation. Providing readers with tools for their own personal translation-related needs, this book encourages an ethical approach to translation and offers an insight into translation as a possible career. This textbook covers foundational concepts; key figures, groups, and events; tools and resources for non-professional translation tasks; and the types of translation that non-translators are liable to encounter. Each chapter includes practical activities, annotated further reading, and summaries of key points suitable for use in classrooms, online teaching, or self-study. There is also a glossary of key terms. De-mystifying Translation: Introducing Translation to Non-translators is the ideal text for any non-specialist taking a course on translation and for anyone interested in learning more about the field of translation and translation studies. The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.
Learning (on) Local Terms Lisa Hellman
Chronotopos : a journal of translation history,
07/2022, Volume:
3, Issue:
1
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
This article compares two manuscript dictionaries, that of John Bradby Blake and Johan Pontin. These dictionaries are Cantonese-English and Cantonese-Swedish respectively, and were both created as a ...result of a stay in the trading hub of Canton in the 1770s. Both dictionaries are shown to follow the word choice, word order and illustrations of Chinese textbooks for language learning, “zazi”. Such zazi were common tools for the linguistic standardisation and schooling reforms of the Qing Empire, but were also used in early European attempts to learn Chinese. Thereby, European efforts to learn Chinese is here shown to follow a Qing imperial pattern, and a non-European structure and logic. The bulk of the scholarship on early sinology in Europe focus on missionaries, and on activities in Beijing. That the two dictionaries studied here translate between European languages and Cantonese, rather than other Chinese dialects, and that they were compiled as part of a commercial, not a scholarly or religious contact, help show the importance also of Canton in the eighteenth century for European-Chinese translation history.
Machine translation (MT) is improving even for low-resource minoritized languages such as Basque, for which free online engines are available. However, the level of adoption and common practices ...involving the technology are unknown, even though it has the potential to disrupt a carefully planned Basque language revitalization and sustainability process. To shed light on MT usage habits and perceptions among the Basque community, we report on the results of a survey of language specialists and general users, and a focus group with professional translators and interpreters. The data shows that MT is already becoming more popular among users of all backgrounds and that, overall, the attitude towards the technology is positive, which might result in increased use in the future. However, participants express concern about the impact MT will have on the development of Basque. The results call for further research on the language impact of MT and MT literacy initiatives.
This study aims to investigate the effect of data augmentation through translation memories for desktop machine translation (MT) fine-tuning in OPUS-CAT. It also focuses on assessing the usefulness ...of desktop MT for professional translators. Engines in three language pairs (English → Turkish, English → Spanish, and English → Catalan) are fine-tuned with corpora of two different sizes. The translation quality of each engine is measured through automatic evaluation metrics (BLEU, chrF2, TER and COMET) and human evaluation metrics (ranking, adequacy and fluency). Overall evaluation results indicate promising quality improvements in all three language pairs and imply that the use of desktop MT applications such as OPUS-CAT and fine-tuning MT engines with custom data in a translator’s desktop can potentially provide high-quality translations aside from their advantages such as privacy, confidentiality and low use of computation power.
Information competence is essential in professional translation and interpreting. This paper gathers the views of professional translators and interpreters in Spain on information competence, by ...means of an exploratory qualitative study. A questionnaire composed essentially of open-ended questions was applied to gather data and the qualitative analysis software ATLAS.ti was used to code the results using thematic content analysis methods. The views provided by a sample of professional translators and interpreters (n = 156) on the importance of information competence were collected, together with their recommendations on this key competence for those who are starting their training in translation and interpreting. The study also explores the main information needs highlighted by professionals, the sources of information they use most frequently and how they verify information, and their opinions on the gender perspective (with explicit mention of inclusive language) as part of information competence in professional practice. The results show that professionals consider information competence to be absolutely essential in the framework of translation competence, and recommend reinforcing information literacy training in university undergraduate degree programmes. They have multiple information needs (from terminological to contextual) that make them turn to a wide range of information resources (mainly personal sources and online documentary resources), but they need to strengthen their knowledge for information evaluation. Regarding the gender perspective, professionals practically limit their answers to their opinions on inclusive language and, although most of them are in favour, some resistance is detected. From the diagnosis carried out in this research, opportunities for supporting information literacy instruction in undergraduate degrees and in continuing professional development are identified.
This article reports results of a survey of government-accredited Irish language translators. The survey addresses a particular cohort of minority language translators in a particular linguistic ...context, where institutional demand for translation is growing. The survey may also be a useful basis for further work on translator job satisfaction. Participants in this survey were passionate about translation and about the Irish language, but conditions of employment clearly affected their concerns and perspectives regarding their profession. All translators report a strong sense of pride in their work, but freelance participants' perceptions of purpose and fairness in work, payment, colleagues, and job security compare poorly to those of their full-time public service colleagues. Freelancers report that they struggle to work together in the face of falling rates, with some accepting low-paying jobs that are against their own and their colleagues' best interests. Many of the freelance participants feel threatened by technology, the potential for machine translation to replace human translators, and their powerlessness regarding translations being repurposed for machine translation training. Responses show a fear of falling translation quality, a lack of translation talent, and the lack of an audience for translation. Participants tend to be negative about domestic Irish language policy but see policy at the EU-level to be beneficial, with forthcoming changes presenting an opportunity for skilled translators.
This paper reports the results of a survey measuring Finnish professional translators’ (N=450) perceptions on translation technology. The paper also introduces a tool that can be used to study the ...perception of such changes, the NEMP model (New Educational Models or Paradigms).Main results indicate that translation technology is perceived by professional translators as an efficient tool that has changed translating in practice, but does not encourage to creativity. Business translators seem to have a more positive perception on translation technology than other respondents (literary or audiovisual translators). As for the method, the results indicate that the NEMP model is a useful method for studying the perception of translation technology.
The number of official translations of games in the videogame market of Iran is very scant. Additionally, the existing ones contain only dubbed or subtitled menus, dialogues and narrations, and they ...has left the rest of in-game texts untranslated. Therefore, the translation needs should be analysed, but study of the game platforms has been ignored. In view of this gap, the current study aimed to analyse Iranian videogame players' needs of the translation of in-game texts. To this end, 5000 gamers' comments about the translations of in-game texts (i.e. menus, game installer applications, system messages, dialogues, narrations, and game manuals) of eight strategy videogames were collected by adopting the participative role and interviewing the professional gamers. The data were then analysed using an inductive approach via Microsoft Word. The findings indicated that the gamers preferred to play games having translated menus, game installer applications, system messages and game manuals; however, they preferred untranslated dialogues and narrations of the games. The findings of the study have implications for professional translators working in the market of videogames.
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