School of Languages and Linguistics - Research Publications
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ItemTranslation Technology and Translation Theory(Translators Association of China, 2013)
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ItemNo Preview AvailableTranslation and language learning: The role of translation in the teaching of languages in the European Union(Publications Office of the European Union, 2013)This study asks how translation, both written and spoken, can contribute to the learning of a foreign or second language (L2) in primary, secondary and higher education. It is based on questionnaire surveys that were responded to by a total of 963 experts and teachers; the qualitative research process further benefited from input by 101 contributors.
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ItemTranslation Research Projects 4(Intercultural Studies Group, 2012)
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ItemDemocratizing translation technologies: the role of humanistic research(The Big Wave, 2012)Recent research on translation memories and machine translation technologies tends to focus on technical issues only, falsely abstracting the technologies from the many different social situations in which they are ostensibly to be used. At the same time, the revolutionary promise of the systems with learning potential is that they will improve output only with widespread use, and thus only through the involvement of different groups of social users. In principle, humanistic research is well positioned to investigate and communicate between the various users, with awareness of different kinds of user, collaborative workflows, text types, and translation purposes. If knowledge on those variables can be fed back into the technical research and development, humanistic research could thus play a key role in enhancing not only the social impact of the technologies, but also their democratization.
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ItemThe status of the translation profession in the European union(Anthem Press, 2011-01-01)Based on thorough and extensive research, this book examines in detail traditional status signals in the translation profession. It provides case studies of eight European and non-European countries, with further chapters on sociological and economic modelling, and goes on to identify a number of policy options and make recommendations on rectifying problem areas.
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ItemTranslation theory as historical problem-solving(Rikkyo University, 2011)Recent calls for non-Western translation theories raise the more basic question of where Western thought comes from and how it is historically conditioned. Here we take the view that the way we translate, and the way we think about translation, depends on the problems we are trying to solve. This means that different problems can give rise to different theories, so Western problems might have given rise to Western theories. More important, this means that when we confront past theories, we should ask what specific problems they were trying to solve, without assuming any homogeneous stock of universal answers. And when we engage in our own theorizing, be it non-Western or simply effective, we should be aware of what specific problems we are trying to solve. This perspective allows some provocative correlations like the following: “equivalence” was most needed when Europe and Canada decided to depend on translation for their multilingual laws; “dynamic equivalence” was about selling Christianity to illiterate communities; “Skopos theory” expressed the aspirations of a professional segment of technical translators that sought greater social recognition and pay, as well as university departments that sought independence; “Descriptive Translation Studies” was seeking the survival of smaller cultures within the West; “foreignization” responded to the Germanic privileging of language, to the French search for opening to the other, and to a well-intentioned call for American intellectuals to seem international in the absence of foreign-language competence; and “non-western” theory is a functional simulacrum designed to oppose some of these new Western theories to apparently old Western theories, in the spirit of an ageing but still hungry modernism. These correlations should not be seen in a deterministic light. Once you have a problem to solve, the ideas you use to solve it can come from anywhere. So we should be aware of not just our own problems, but also of what others have done with theirs. And this in turn should answer the question of whether we need Eastern or Western ideas, or simply ideas that can help solve the problems we face. Needless to say, the priority we give to problem-solving is Western.
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ItemEmpirisme et mauvaise philosophie en traductologie(Septentrion Presses Universitaires, 2011)Translation can be known through direct engagement with the practice or profession, through theoretical propositions, or through empirical applications of theoretical propositions. Here we make the argument that the repetition of theoretical propositions without empirical application leads to some unhelpful pieces of philosophy. This particularly concerns the following general postulates: 1) “translation is difference”, tested on Walter Benjamin’s reference to the untranslatability of words for bread; 2) “translation is survival”, tested on Homi Bhabha’s use of Benjamin and Derrida (who do not survive the use); 3) “translators are authors”, tested on the “alien I”, pseudotranslations and process studies; and 4) “translation is cultural translation”, tested on the subject positions created by a piece of current Germanic theoretical discourse. On all four counts, the case is made that the practice of translation exceeds its theory, thus requiring an ongoing empirical attitude.
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ItemTranslation research terms: a tentative glossary for moments of perplexity and dispute(Intercultural Studies Group, 2011)The following is a list of terms with recommendations for their use in research on translation and interpreting. The list has been compiled on the basis of doubts that have arisen in discussions with students completing doctoral research within the Intercultural Studies Group at the Universitat Rovira i Virgili in Tarragona, Spain. In some cases our notes merely alert researchers to some of the ambiguities and vagaries of fairly commonplace nomenclatures. In other cases, however, we have sought to standardize terms across research projects in a particular field (for example, translator training or risk analysis).