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Innovation in discourse analytic approaches to translation studies
Jeremy Munday, University of Leeds, UK
Meifang Zhang, University of Macau, China
This panel investigates new developments in discourse analysis and translation studies, and to discuss possible new modes of research in translation and interpreting. Text and discourse analysis theories have played an important role in applied translation studies since the early 1990s (Baker 1992/2011, Hatim and Mason 1990, 1997, Nord 1991/2005, etc.). As a method of linguistic analysis, discourse analysis is holistic, dealing not with single words or sentences but with entire constituents of an act of communication. Applied to translation, it has often drawn on Hallidayan systemic functional linguistics (above all, the analysis of the function of transitivity, cohesion and thematic/information structure) and, for analysis of political texts in relation to power and ideology, it has often drawn on theories of critical discourse analysis (e.g. Fairclough 1989/2001, 2003).
However, it has tended to be restricted to the analysis of written translation and to a relatively restricted number of languages. Also, because it has tended to underplay the role of discourse in enacting social identities, discourse analytic approaches have been somewhat marginalized by new directions in translation studies, inspired by cultural and sociological studies.
This panel attempts to build on past work but to draw on developments in translation practice and on new interdisciplinary theories and models to question current methods and to broaden the very role of discourse analysis in translation studies. Following are special issues to be discussed:
1. The challenges of the translation of new genres and modes of communication (social media, tweets, collaborative translation, etc.).
2. Models of discourse analysis appropriate to the translation of multimodal texts (adverts, comics, videogames and other audiovisual texts).
3. The relation between the qualitative discourse analysis of human translation and the quantitative analysis of machine translation, computer-assisted translation, etc.
4. The relation of extratextual factors and intratextual features in analysis (for example, in corpus-based translation studies or in the study of translation/interpreting of media and political texts).
5. The role of discourse analysis in analysing the construction of identity in translation/interpreting.
For informal enquiries: [jDOTmundayATleedsDOTacDOTuk]
Jeremy Munday is Professor of Translation Studies at the University of Leeds, UK. He is author of Introducing Translation Studies (3rd edition, Routledge, 2012), Evaluation in Translation (Routledge, 2012), Style and Ideology in Translation (Routledge, 2008) and co-author, with Basil Hatim, of Translation: An advanced resource book (Routledge, 2004). His research interests include translation shift analysis, translation and ideology and the application of systemic functional linguistics to translation. Contact details: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Meifang ZHANG is Professor of Translation Studies at the University of Macau, China. She has published widely in translation and intercultural studies. Her research interests include discourse and functional approaches to Translation Studies, media discourse and translation, translation teaching and translation assessment. She was organizer of the First International Conference on Discourse and Translation (2002 Guangzhou), the International Round Table Seminar on Discourse and Translation (2012 Macao), and co-organizer of the 2014 International Round Table Seminar on Discourse and Translation (2014 Leeds). Contact details: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
SESSION PLAN
Each paper is allocated with a 20 minutes time slot + 10 minutes discussion.
Discussion at the end of each paper
PART I: Theoretical approaches
PAPER 1:
Title: Innovation in discourse analytic approaches to translation studies
Speaker: Christian M.I.M. Matthiessen, Elaine Espindola, Mira Kim, Kazuhiro Teruya and Canzhong Wu
PAPER 2:
Title: Modeling translation as instantiation
Speaker: Chenguang Chang
PAPER 3:
Title: Assessing Meaning-Dimension Interpreting Quality: from SFL perspective
Speaker: Qianhua Ouyang
PAPER 4:
Title: Challenges of the translation of syntactic structures and cohesive devices in conceptually spoken registers – the case of ellipsis
Speaker: Katrin Menzel
PAPER 5:
Title: Investigating translation through analysis of lexical priming
Speaker: Jeremy Munday
PART II: Application of theoretical models to case analysis
PAPER 6:
Title: Discourse and Ideology in Translated Children's Literature. A Comparative Study
Speaker: Juliane House and Themis Kaniklidou
PAPER 7:
Title: Representing Culture through Images: A Multimodal Approach to Translations of the Chinese Classic Mulan
Speaker: XI CHEN
PAPER 8:
Title: Peeping into Europe's Liquidity through CADS and MD-CADS
Speaker: María Calzada Pérez
PAPER 9:
Title: What happens when translation assessment meets social activism in cyberspace?: The discursive construction of the 'assessor' role on the web
Speaker: Ji-Hae Kang
PAPER 10:
Title: Changing Focuses in Translated News for Target Readers: A discourse approach to Global Times' stance and positioning in Snowden's Disclosures
Speaker: Meifang Zhang
PAPER TITLES, ABSTRACTS AND BIONOTES
PAPER 1
Title: Innovation in discourse analytic approaches to translation studies
Speaker: Christian M.I.M. Matthiessen, Elaine Espindola, Mira Kim, Kazuhiro Teruya and Canzhong Wu
Abstract: The process of translation centrally involves choice in meaning (see Matthiessen, 2014a): translators choose among options in the meaning potentials of the source language and the target language as they interpret the meanings of the source text and recreate them in the translation they are producing. To reveal these choices, we can undertake text analysis based on systemic descriptions of the meaning potentials of the languages involved (cf. Matthiessen, Teruya & Wu, 2008). Such text analysis is systemic in the sense that it involves ongoing reference to the systems of choice that make up a meaning potentials of the languages involved. By revealing choices in this way, we can empower practising translators, assessors of translation quality, translation students and of course translation scholars. In this paper, we will report on our use of systemic text analysis in a range complementary contexts important to translators: in the development of a course and materials for translation students, in the investigation of features of translated texts and in the study of systemic similarities and differences between languages undertaken to bring out patterns that can guide translators (e.g. the translation of representations of motion from English into Chinese, Japanese, Spanish or Portuguese). Common to these contexts of study is our reliance on systemic descriptions of languages that bring out the meaning potentials inherent in them (e.g. Teruya, 2007). This is significant since translators must operate with multilingual meaning potentials (see Matthiessen, 2014b), i.e. the resources they rely on when they recreate the meanings of the source language text in the target language. We will therefore also refer to our work on the systemic description of multlingual meaning potentials (cf. Bateman, Matthiessen & Zeng, 1999).
Bionote: Christian M.I.M. Matthiessen was born in Sweden, where he grew and was educated up through his undergraduate university education. He lived in Los Angeles 1979 to 1988, and in Sydney 1988 to 2008, when in he moved to Hong Kong. He is Chair Professor of the Department of English, the Faculty of Humanities at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University, where he is a member of the PolySystemic Research Group. He has degrees in linguistics from Lund University (BA), and UCLA (MA, PhD), and has previously held positions at USC/ Information Sciences Institute, Sydney University, and Macquarie University.
PAPER 2
Title: Modeling translation as instantiation
Speaker: Chenguang Chang
Abstract: This paper is an attempt to investigate translation from the perspective of functional discourse analysis and theorizes translation as a process of instantiation of the meaning potential of the source text. In systemic functional linguistics, the instantiation hierarchy relates system to instance. The analogy of climate and weather has been used on many occasions in the literature to characterize the complementary relationship between system and text. It is argued that, just as the climate is the potential that lies behind all the weather instances, the system of language is the potential that lies behind all text instances. Since a text can be read in different ways, depending on the social subjectivity of readers, we can actually represent any text to be translated as itself a meaning potential and the different translated versions as instantiations of that meaning potential. In modeling instantiation, there are two main factors we can focus on, coupling and commitment, where commitment refers to the amount of meaning potential activated in a particular process of instantiation. In this paper, I will try to explore commitment as manifested in the novel Pride and Prejudice and its various simplified and translated versions and compare how meanings in the systems are taken up and the degree of delicacy selected within systems. The analysis will focus in particular on the different degrees of ideational and interpersonal commitment in the adapted versions. It is found that, in general, the adapted versions are less committed both ideationally and interpersonally, due to the drastic reduction in details and projections, and that between the adaptations there are also significant differences in the amount of meaning potential activated. It is shown that the different choices made by the authors and translators are constrained by the different purposes that they set out to achieve, and each translated version represents different degrees of commitment.
Bionote: Chang Chenguang is Professor of English at the School of Foreign Languages, Sun Yat-sen University. His research interests include Systemic Functional Linguistics, discourse analysis, applied linguistics and English education.
PAPER 3:
Title: Assessing Meaning-Dimension Interpreting Quality: from SFL perspective
Speaker: Qianhua OUYANG
Abstract: Transferring meaning is a fundamental task in interpreting, especially in the consecutive mode. This is affirmed by previous discussions of interpreter training as well as survey-based explorations of interpreting quality. However, research on how to assess this very important aspect of interpreting within the pedagogical field of consecutive interpreting (CI) has rarely been done and assessment methods have been largely intuitive and subjective. This research brings the inter-textual analysis under the framework of Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) into the assessment of students' CI products and investigates whether this approach can yield more objective and systematic assessment results. Three commonly adopted quality criteria are associated with the three meaning streams of SFL in the proposed assessment model, namely accuracy with ideational meaning, appropriateness with interpersonal meaning and coherence with textual meaning, which are checked on both register level and lexicogrammatical level. The implementation of the model involves four steps. Step 1 is the analysis of the source text (ST). It begins with the description of the situation context of ST and a brief statement of the register, which are followed by the analysis of the ideational and interpersonal meaning on the clause-level. Textual meaning is examined with interpreting segment as the unit. Step 2 is the ST and TT contrasted analysis in the micro-level that lexicogrammatical realization of meaning is scrutinized using parameters from SFL. Meaning deviations are marked and counted with a set of analytical codes. This step is then supplemented by the macro-level analysis in step 3, which looked into the register consistency of the ST and TT. Step 4 yields a general statement on the error patterning and meaning-dimension quality of the interpretation, supported by concrete examples from step 2 and 3. The proposed model was applied to assess students' interpretations to test its feasibility. 10 students' interpretations between Chinese and English were randomly selected out of 76 pieces of interpretations collected in two quasi-exam sessions. They formed a corpus size of around 80 minutes, which were transcribed and tagged. The empirical evidences collected through the implementation of the IQA model leads to the following findings: First, by marking and coding, the error patterning generated in step 2 can reflect the major sources of interpreting problems.; second, the assessment indicates the underlying reasons for respective interpreting problems; Third, as the assessment is supported by the SFL's philosophy of language use, the teachers could give SFL-supported solutions on how to make due improvement.
Bionote: OUYANG, Qianhua received her undergraduate and postgraduate education at Guangdong University of Foreign Studies (GDUFS), China, and gained her PhD degree in linguistics at University of Macau in 2012. She is now a lecturer at the School of Interpreting and Translation Studies of GDUFS. OUYANG is a member of Chinese's Translator's Association and a founding member of the Macau Federation of Translators and Interpreters. She has also been a conference interpreter for 8 years. Her main research interests are interpreting pedagogy, interpreting quality assessment and discourse analysis in interpreting.
PAPER 4
Title: Challenges of the translation of syntactic structures and cohesive devices in conceptually spoken registers – the case of ellipsis
Speaker: Katrin Menzel
Abstract: The aim of this paper is to investigate challenges of the analysis and translation of certain syntactic structures in conceptually spoken registers. Text and discourse types can be placed along a written spoken continuum (Koch/Oesterreicher 1994) according to aspects such as naturalness, communicative closeness, co-spatiality or dialogicity. Conceptually spoken registers typically, but not necessarily, are medially spoken. They are characterized strongly by certain features associated with orality, i.e. they might be more spontaneous, less edited, less coherent or show less structural complexity than conceptually written registers. Prototypical conceptually spoken language is everyday face-to-face communication, while prototypical conceptually written language can be found, for instance, in legal document or academic publications. If texts are written to be spoken, performative orality (Speyer, 2013) might also be considered among the features contributing to the general orality of a register.
Text and discourse analysis (Halliday&Hasan 1976, 1985/2004, De Beaugrande/Dressler 1981, Fairclough 1989/2001) when applied to translation studies (Reiss 1983, 1986, Nord 1989, 1999, Hatim/Mason 1990) often have a focus on the functionally equivalent translation of conceptionally written text types with relatively standardised features. Text types that are frequently used in translator training include technical and scientific texts, newspaper articles, tourism leaflets, legal documents etc. Although discourse analysis itself has contributed much to the monolingual analysis of spoken language in linguistics in general, the specific syntax, cohesive devices and crosslinguistic aspects of conceptually spoken registers often do not get enough attention in translator training.
This paper provides an innovate perspective on crosslinguistic discourse analytic approaches using comparable texts from conceptionally spoken corpus registers. The corpus texts are part of the English-German GECCo corpus (http://www.gecco.uni-saarland.de/GECCo/en.Home.html) and cover various symmetric and asymmetric communication scenarios as well as different types of monologic and dialogic discourse, such as political speeches, interviews, talkshows, doctor-patient communication or internet forums. The corpus allows an intensive contrastive investigation of cohesion.
This paper takes ellipses as an example of syntactic patterns and cohesive ties frequently used in conceptually spoken registers and puts them into a wider context of other syntactic structures and cohesive devices. For this purpose, crosslinguistically comparable core categories of ellipsis and fine-grained annotation guidelines have been developed (Menzel, 2014, project-internal ellipsis annotation guidelines) and ellipses have been annotated. In a corpus of the size of GECCo (ca. 1,44 mio tokens in total), manual annotation was not extremely time-consuming and lead to consistent, reproducible annotations. The data will be used for improving automatic identification methods for ellipsis subtypes. The corpus data of the analysed registers indicate typical frequencies and distribution patterns of ellipses in various English and German conceptually spoken registers. Among other things, it can be demonstrated that there is a connection between the social role and different knowledge backgrounds of discourse participants and their use of certain syntactical patterns and elliptical structures. This will be relevant for discourse analysis in general and for the training of translators who need to have a crosslinguistic awareness of the specific linguistic features of conceptually spoken language in different communication scenarios.
Bionote: Katrin Menzel studied Conference Interpreting and Translation Studies in Saarbrücken, Germany. She has been working as a teaching and research staff member at the Department of Applied Linguistics, Translating and Interpreting at Saarland University since 2011. Katrin is involved in the research project "GECCo" on cohesion in English and German and works on the case study of ellipses as cohesive ties for her PhD thesis.
PAPER 5
Title: Investigating translation through analysis of lexical priming
Speaker: Jeremy Munday
Abstract: This paper proposes to investigate the potential of lexical priming (Hoey 2005) for explaining evaluative translation choice and translator intervention. Lexical priming presents a theory of language which is organized around preferred patterns of collocation and is linked in some ways to the concept of semantic association (Hoey) or prosody (Louw 1993), where a denotatively neutral word such as consequence may tend to occur in negative contexts and attract negative meanings.
Hoey himself has briefly applied his theory to the analysis of translation and concludes by suggesting that "translation is a potential source of drifts" in a word's priming because "the translator has the choice of either preserving the primings of the target language or importing the primings of the source language (or, of course, a mixture of both)" (Hoey 2011: 167). But his view adopts a perspective of diachronic linguistics rather than of translation studies. What I propose here is to investigate how far lexical priming choices in translation are an indicator of translation orientation as well as those factors which influence those choices. In particular, I wish to examine two concepts of Hoey's theory in the context of translation: (1) that primings may "crack" and be mended and, concomitantly, (2) that each individual is exposed to a unique linguistic experience, which means that their productive primings may vary, but that this is countered by the harmonizing forces of education, the media, etc. (see Hoey 2005: 11).
The paper will analyse specific examples of translation, using close analysis of both longer text pairs and of individual lexical primings in larger corpora. This will be supported by analysis of discussions on translator forums and from translator correspondence to try to uncover the reasons behind drifts or crackings. The ramifications for the theory of translation will be discussed, especially the potential usefulness of lexical priming for interdisciplinary discourse analytic approaches, such as stylistics, systemic-functional and Critical discourse analysis models, that may enhance descriptive studies and translator training.
Bionote: Jeremy Munday is Professor of Translation Studies at the University of Leeds, UK. He is author of Introducing Translation Studies (3rd edition, Routledge, 2012), Evaluation in Translation (Routledge, 2012), Style and Ideology in Translation(Routledge, 2008) and co-author, with Basil Hatim, of Translation: An advanced resource book (Routledge, 2004). His research interests include translation shift analysis, translation and ideology and the application of systemic functional linguistics to translation.
PAPER 6
Title: Discourse and Ideologyin Translated Children's Literature. A Comparative Study
Speaker: Juliane House and Themis Kaniklidou
Abstract: Children's literature in translation has long remained a rather side-lined and under-researched domain. More recently, however, it has attracted increased attention (cf. e.g. van Coillie and Verschueren 2006; Lathey 2010; Ruzicka Kenfel 2014). Many researchers today agree that children's literature in general, and translated children's literature in particular, play an important role in children's socialization. In this paper, we examine changes which original children's literature frequently undergoes when it is translated into different languages. Using the discourse-comparative method outlined in House (in press), we specifically investigate how ideological manipulation of original texts leads to shifts in the translations in different languages and on various linguistic levels. We use a multilingual corpus of selected English children's books translated into German, Greek, Czech, Arabic, Spanish and Korean. This corpus is currently put together by members of a research group interested in children's literature in translation. In this comparative research we want to describe and possibly explain the surprising liberties taken by translators in their covert translations into different languages. Preliminary findings reveal a number of shifts that highlight a) underlying cross-cultural discourse preferences reflected in the translations through massive 'cultural filtering' b) ideological leanings of translators who tacitly guide reader assumptions, c) educational and didactic adjustments to stock societal ideas and 'official' narratives, d) patterns of a 'discourse of sentimentalization' revealing translators' and editors' ideological assumptions about childhood and the role relationship between adults and children. Given this innovative, corpus-based intercultural discourse approach to translated children's literature, we hope to reveal both shared and divergent patterns of ideological manipulations
Bionote: Juliane House received her first degree in English and Spanish translation and international law from Heidelberg University, her PhD in Applied Linguistics from the University of Toronto, Canada and honorary doctorates from the Universities of Jyväskylä, Finland and Jaume I, Castellon, Spain. She is Emeritus Professor, Hamburg University and Distinguished University Professor at Hellenic American University, Athens, Greece as well as President of the International Association for Translation and Intercultural Studies (IATIS). Her research interests include translation, contrastive pragmatics, discourse analysis, politeness theory, English as a lingua franca, and intercultural studies. She has published widely in all these areas.
PAPER 7
Title: Representing Culture through Images: A Multimodal Approach to Translations of the Chinese Classic Mulan
Speaker: XI CHEN
Abstract: Mulan is a Chinese maiden who impersonates a man and takes her father's place in a war to counter a fictitious Hun invasion. In China, the legend of Mulan first appeared in The Ballad of Mulan during the Northern Dynasties (386-581) and gradually became a part of Chinese classical literature. The Chinese American writer Kingston introduced Mulan to the western readers in the book The Woman Warrior (1976). Since the 1990s, a number of children's picture books have been published in America with some adaptations of the original story. Then Disney's animated films Mulan (1998) and Mulan II (2005) made Mulan a national heroine in the West.
This paper attempts to investigate the translations of Mulan in China and in the U.S. with special attention paid to the cultural transplantation of different images of Mulan in picture books. The study refers to theory of multimodal discourse analysis (Kress and Van Leeuwen, 1996, 2006) and the idea of intersemiotic translation (Jakobson, 1959) as the theoretical basis for analysis and discussion. Two bilingual picture books are examined: The Song of Mulan (2011, Shanghai People's Fine Arts Publishing House) and Mulan (2012, Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press, imported the copyright by Disney Studio). The data from the bilingual picture books are divided into textual and extra-textual materials. Textual materials are the Chinese and English texts in the picture books, and extra-textual materials refer to the images of Mulan in these picture books. Firstly, a detailed comparison between the Chinese and English texts is made to examine the shifts in translation in different picture books. Secondly, the images of Mulan in different picture books are investigated with multimodal discourse analysis of the two important semiotic resources: color and line, with the focus on the dressing, hairstyle, facial expression and background setting in the picture books. Thirdly, the analysis of textual and extra-materials are combined together to investigate the building and rebuilding of Mulan's images in the picture books as a whole. Finally, the findings in relation to possible constraints affecting the translations and images are also discussed. It is hoped that this research can shed some light on the future researches in this field.
Bionote: Chen Xi is a PhD student in translation studies under the supervision of Prof. Zhang Meifang at the University of Macau. Her main research interests include translation studies, multimodal discourse analysis and intercultural studies.
PAPER 8
Title: Peeping into Europe's Liquidity through CADS and MD-CADS
Speaker: María Calzada Pérez
Abstract: Already in 2006, Maria Tymozcko (2006: 15) proposed a way for Translation Studies to move forward -- the constant questioning (and often rejection) of presuppositions about our field and the subsequent enlargement of our object of study (which surpasses linguistic transfer and enters the realms of representation and transculturation). "In broadening the definition of translation", argues Tymoczko (2006:27), "it may also be helpful to consider forms and modes of intercultural interface that are related to translation but distinct from it".
Europe is one such hybridized interface. Described by Bauman (2004:89) as "a homeland of perpetual translation", Europe is not just a multicultural society where linguistic transfer occurs, it is also the embodiment of translation as unstoppable transformation/representation/transculturation. For better or for worse, it is one of globalization's main faces and, as such, it is a form of vorhanden rather than zuhanden, where standing still is forbidden.
In order to peep into (a small part of) the "liquid" constellation of meanings Europe encapsulates, the present paper chooses to work within the terrain of Discourse Analysis, which has proven to be an important source of TS innovative research protocols since the early 1990s. In the past, innovation has often come from theoretical flexibility, and the borrowing of goals and methods from other fields. The same is true at present, in the case of CADS (Computer-Assisted Discourse Analysis, see Partington et al. 2013) and MD-CADS (Modern Diachronic Discourse Analysis) (see Taatvitsainen et al. 2014), the main frameworks within which this research is developed.
In sum, this paper commutes from the macro to the micro levels, drawing on qualitative methods (e.g. Munday 2012; Wodak et al. 1999) and quantitative corpus-based procedures (e.g. Sinclair 2003, Tognini-Bonelli 2001, Xiao and McEnery 2006, Bayley 2004, Partington et al. 2004). It focuses on the coalescence of macro-strategies, strategies, themes/topos, "rich nodes" and textural (lexical/syntactic) realization.
The paper uses the afore-mentioned theory and methods in the analysis of the European Comparable and Parallel Corpora (ECPC), a bilingual archive of parliamentary speeches from 2004-2011's proceedings of the European Parliament (EP), the Spanish Congreso de los Diputados (CD) and the British House of Commons (HC). The archive draws on work done in projects such as the OPUS open source parallel corpus (OPUS, Tiedemann 2009), the Translational English Corpus (TEC, Laviosa 1998, Baker 1999) and the English Norwegian Parallel Corpus (ENPC, Johansson 1997, 2007). However, it incorporates contextual (sociolinguistic and sociocultural) and metalinguistic (i.e. speakers' status, gender, constituency, party affiliation, birth-date, birth-place, post, and institutional body and sub-body of representation) data, through XML annotation, that makes it unique.
Bionote: María Calzada Pérez is full professor in translation studies at the Universitat Jaume I (Castellón Spain). Her main areas of interest are CADS and MD-CADS, translation and ideology, the European Union and multimodality. She is author of La aventura de la traducción (2001), El espejo traductológico (2007), Transitivity in Translating (2007) . She is also editor of Apropos of ideology (2003), two special volumes on Corpus-based Translation Studies for the International Journal of Translation (2009, with Noemí Marín Cucala), and Exploring New Paths in Language Pedagogy (2010, with María Moreno Jaén and Fernando Serrano).
PAPER 9
Title: What happens when translation assessment meets social activism in cyberspace?: The discursive construction of the 'assessor' role on the web
Speaker: Ji-Hae Kang
Abstract: This paper explores the ways in which translation assessment is discursively constructed by readers participating in an online translation debate. Focusing on a controversy over the Korean translation of Steve Jobs, the present study examines how the readers participating in a translation debate in Daum Agora, the largest online discussion forum in South Korea, enact the 'assessor' role in evaluating the quality of translation. Based on discourse analysis of messages posted in Agora, including 908 reply messages, and drawing on the concepts of 'social role,' 'activity role,' and 'discourse role,' the study examines how online assessors formulate discourses about translation and assessment. I argue that these assessors perform the discourse roles of 'expert-judge', 'social activist', and 'assessment evaluator'. As the assessor role category is neither stable nor uniform, the discourses of assessment are fraught with varied, and even contradictory, portrayal of translation and quality.
The study shows that translation assessment in cyberspace is far from neutral or objective evaluation of fixed meanings; it is a contextualizing process where value and meaning are often a matter of uptake. Assessors' critiques of capitalist structures and calls to correct unethical practices in the translation/publishing field play an important role in enhancing social awareness concerning translation problems. What has hitherto remained the object of interest to only a small community of translators and translation scholars is now more widely discussed in cyberspace due to the conflation of online assessment and activist modes of resistance. Furthermore, in using the discourse-based method to examine the ways in which assessors discursively perform distinct roles in cyberspace, this study shows that discourse analysis is an effective tool in examining translation assessment in cyberspace as a socially situated act that involves intricate negotiation of meaning, complex workings of power, and a reconstitution of local social positioning within global cultural flows. Regardless of whether this method is used in the process of comparing source and target texts, multiple target texts of the same source text, translations and nontranslations, or of analyzing the discursive construction of translation assessment-related phenomena, the findings suggest that discourse-based approaches play critical roles in illuminating the complexity and intricacy of translation and assessment.
Bionote: Ji-Hae Kang is Professor of Translation Studies in the Department of English Language and Literature, Ajou University, South Korea. She is the author of Thongyekuy Ihay [Understanding Interpreting] (Hankookmunhwasa, 2004) and numerous articles in The Translator, Meta, and other leading translation studies publications. She is the editor of The KATS Journal of Translation Studies and is on the editorial board of Perspectives. Her research interests include institutional translation, digital media and translation, issues of power and ideology, and discourse analysis-based approaches to translation and interpreting.
PAPER 10
Title: Changing Focuses in Translated News for Target Readers: A discourse approach to Global Times' stance and positioning in Snowden's Disclosures
Speaker: Meifang Zhang
Abstract: In recent years translation scholars have explored different ways to the study of translation phenomena, one of which is to employ the appraisal framework in the analysis of translated texts and in evaluating attitudes in the texts. The appraisal framework, which was developed by Martin and White and their colleagues (2005) upon Systemic Functional Linguistics, includes three aspects: engagement, attitude, and graduation. According to Martin and White, Graduation "is a general property of values of affect, judgement and appreciation that they construe greater or lesser degrees of positivity or negativity" (2005: 135). This paper employs the concept of Graduation from the appraisal framework to examine the Chinese and English versions of news reports on the Edward Snowden disclosures. All the data in this research comes from the Global Times, which offers a Chinese edition and an English edition. The Global Times is a Chinese-based news agency, it is owned and published by People's Daily (which is possessed by the Communist Party of China). The data for the analysis are from the news released by Global Times during the period of June to December 2013. By adopting both the quantitative and qualitative methods, the analysis is conducted with an aim to find out what has been highlighted and fully translated, what has been changed and what has been omitted in the translation. It also attempts to identify the news agency's stance and politics in translating sensitive news such as the Snowden case. The paper also discusses other possible reasons for the changes in the translated news.
Bionote: Meifang Zhang is Professor of Translation Studies at the University of Macau, China. She has published widely in translation and intercultural studies. Her research interests include discourse and functional approaches to Translation Studies, media discourse and translation, translation teaching and translation assessment. She was organizer of the First International Conference on Discourse and Translation (2002 Guangzhou), the International Round Table Seminar on Discourse and Translation (2012 Macao), and co-organizer of the 2014 International Round Table Seminar on Discourse and Translation (2014 Leeds). Contact details: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.