School of Languages and Linguistics - Research Publications
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ItemTrust and Cooperation through Social Media: COVID-19 translations for Chinese communities in Melbourne(Routledge, 2022-01-01)A pandemic calls for behaviour-change communication: The ethical aim is to have the receiver voluntarily adopt cooperative actions for the wider good of the community. In the case of superdiverse cites, this entails significant translation and mediation across languages and media, since cooperative actions are to no avail if they do not occur in all sections of society. Messages thus have to attract high degrees of trustworthiness. Social media are sites of particular turbulence in this respect for several reasons: (1) They are privileged media for the circulation of dissent; (2) social-media users have high indices of media-comparison behaviour, judging information on one medium in terms of another, thus exhibiting low levels of initial trust; and (3) linguistically diverse communities have electronic media in their first language coming from outside the immediate community, potentially entering into conflict with officially generated and translated information. Here we look at social media use in Melbourne in order to identify instances of trust and distrust in translated pandemic information across several media. We assess the consequences for cooperative behaviour.
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ItemConceptual tools in translation history(Routledge, 2021)Western translation historiography has developed a set of conceptual tools with which to talk about translations in terms of separate languages, cultures, and texts, with operational maxims for distinguishing translations from non-translations, and translators from authors. Those concepts assume a foundational binarism that became strong in the early modern period in Europe and may be described as the Western translation form. They then moved outwards from Europe, first as a fellow travelertraveller of modernity, and later with the spread of Western translation studies. Translation historians have, nevertheless, become increasingly aware of alternative translation forms that consistently challenge the Western concepts. Here, it is proposed that the wider plurality might be embraced by honing conceptual tools that, for example, do not systematically separate orality and iconic communication from the written text,; that recognize the ways translators seek trust, collaboration, and inclusion in diverse intercultures,; and that work from technologies as the driving forces of translation history. In developing such concepts, translation historians should further recognize that they are responding to the priorities of the present, in a world where electronic media are revealing the historicity of truths once thought eternal.
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ItemWest enters East. A strange case of unequal equivalences in Soviet translation theory(Frank & Timme, 2016)Translation Studies developed on both sides of the Cold War with a remarkable lack of comparative perspectives, often as two separate hubs. Soviet thinking about translation was nevertheless influenced by Western theories in the mid 1970s, generally coinciding with renewed promises from machine translation and a thaw in Cold War relations. The Soviet discourse of “exactitude” and “adequacy” was thus put into contact with a recent Western discourse based on “transformation” and “equivalence”. Evidence of this can be seen in the history of the term “equivalence”, which prior to the 1970s broadly implied one-to-one correspondence, and yet after the 1970s was more generally understood as the textual result, on whatever level, of linguistic transformation.
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ItemWhere Translation Studies lost the plot: Relations with language teaching(Koyo Shobo, 2017)Recent interest in the role of translation in language teaching calls for dialogue between the disciplines of Translation Studies and Language Education. In framing this dialogue, translation scholars would do well to avoid assuming superiority or special knowledge; they would instead do well to reflect on the history of their own discipline, particularly the opposition to language departments that can be found in some countries in the 1980s and 1990s. In politically turning away from language learning, translation scholars left the education field open for unopposed implantation of immersion and communicative teaching methods that ideologically shunned translation. Further, in framing their major internal debates in terms of binary categories, usually involving a good translation method opposed to a bad one, translation scholars themselves all but abandoned the non-binary pedagogical models that once included many types of translation solutions. Those non-binary models should now be investigated anew in order to rebrand translation for the language-education community. In so doing, however, translation scholars may need to break the unspoken pact that they have developed with the translation professions. They should instead adopt a view where everyone can translate, not just professionals, and everyone can be trained to translate better.
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ItemLocalization, training, and instrumentalization(Intercultural Studies Group, 2014)Discourses on the cross-cultural rendering of software and websites now huddle around one of the major communication sectors of our time, known by the semi-misnomer “localization”. However, the key concepts of the localization industry tend not to concern translation, which is often marginalized as a non-communicative phrase-replacement activity. This poses serious problems for the training institutions that would want to prepare translators to enter the industry. In the absence of any stable “localization competence” that might be mapped straight onto a study program, our training institutions must take steps to convey competence in the basic technologies and to develop links with the localization industry. Such links are partly strained by the very different ways in which industry and the academy convert knowledge into economic capital, and thus by the ways in which they build social networks. For sociological reasons, relations between the academy and the localization industry have not been easy. At the same time, this disjuncture should allow training institutions to offer a critical view of localization discourses and technologies, particularly of those that turn cross-cultural communication into phrase replacement exercises. Rather than supply cheap labor for industry, intelligent training should intervene in the future of localization itself.
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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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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).
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ItemNo Preview AvailableTranslating between languages(Routledge, 2016)