Multilingualism and Translation: Seeking Innovative and Integrative Approaches to Language Research
Elena Basile, University of Toronto, Canada
Maria Constanza Guzmán, York University, Canada

In the last decades, multilingualism and translation have drawn increasing critical attention from researchers across a range of fields in the humanities and the social sciences. Multilingualism especially has become a frequently used keyword to describe literary and social practices that have historically challenged the monolingual constraints upon which the 19th century European tradition of modern "national" literatures has been built (Emily Apter, Paul Bandia, Brian Lennon, Françoise Lionnet, Sherry Simon among others). Modernist, post-modernist and post-colonial writing insistently deploys multilingual and translation tactics to highlight underworlds, dissonances, erasures and tensions that traverse and fracture the subject and haunt the dream of cultural unity of the monolingual nation-state and its imperialist logic. On the other hand, translation scholars attentive to the social have been drawing attention to problems of linguistic diversity, linguistic genocide and the global erosion of the ethnosphere (Mona Baker, Deborah Cameron, Michael Cronin, Rita Khotari, Yaseen Noorani, Alison Phipps among others). These scholars offer politically nuanced analyses of the problems attendant to the intertwining of multilingualism and translation in a globalized world. Despite a general agreement around the importance of paying critical attention to multilingualism and translation in the areas of literature, culture and society, the application of terminology and concepts related to both terms remains uncertain and shifting, ranging from narrowly linguistic categorizations (and multiplication of subcategories) to loosely conceptualized usage of both terms. It is important to examine the richness and variety of innovative approaches to multilingual texts and translative practices, as they may offer valuable and productive tools to engage with an array of literary, cultural, social and political phenomena.

This panel aims to bring together scholars interested in asking questions pertaining to the methods, terminology and areas of research in multilingualism and translation. Its aim is to start exploring potential avenues of interdisciplinary conversation among diverse critical approaches to the problems and processes of language transfer, mixture and interchange in different literary and social contexts. The topics for discussion include: 1) Challenges of defining translation in the context of multilingualism. 2) Intercultural pedagogies: translation in the multilingual classroom. 3) Multilingualism, translation and constructions of citizenship; 4) Historical perspectives on language and nation; 5) Linguistic borders and post-colonial translation zones; 6) Geopolitics of multilingualism and translation; 7) Linguistic diversity, linguistic human rights; 8) Textual criticism and poetics of translation and multilingualism; 9) Reception and circulation of multilingual texts; 10) Translating multilingual texts. We are particularly interested in developing a common vocabulary and a set of integrative strategies to approach the stratified and interlaced problems related to multilingualism and translation, so as to open up new paths of research in these areas.

For informal enquiries: [ebasileATyorkuDOTca]

Elena Basile (Ph.D.) is a translator and sessional lecturer in the Sexual Diversity Studies Program at the University of Toronto, and in the English Department at York University. She writes on translation and multilingual Canadian poetries (essays in New Voices in Translation Studies, Open Letter, Canada and Beyond) and has translated into Italian Nicole Brossard's novel Le désert mauve (2011). She is a founding member of the Multiligualism Research Group at York University, and collaborates regularly with artists and academics in Europe and Canada, exploring ecologies of linguistic diversity in contexts of cultural displacement and hybridization. Her present research focuses on the translative politics of feminist queer migrant poetics. Her most recent collaborative multimedia project, Transitions in Progress: Making Space for Place, is part of a EU-Canada International Project titled Performigrations: People are the Territory (2014-2016).

 

María ConstanzaGuzmán is Associate Professor in the School of Translation and the Hispanic Studies Department at York University. She teaches in the MA in translation and in the graduate program in the Humanities, and coordinates the Spanish-English Translation Certificate and the Research Group in Translation and Transcultural Contact. Her publications include the articles "Toward a Conceptualization of the Translator's Legacy", "Who do We Teach for? Thinking Translation for Social Awareness in Toronto" (co-authored with Rosalind Gill), and "Translating Latin America: Reading Translators' Archives." She is the author of the book Gregory Rabassa's Latin American Literature: A Translator's Visible Legacy, co-editor of Translation and Literary Studies: Homage to Marilyn Gaddis Rose, and the editor-in-chief of the journal Tusaaji: A Translation Review.

 

 

 

 

See other thematic panels

SESSION PLAN

The first and last sessions of the panel will have a 10 minute introduction and a 10 minute conclusion respectively. Apart from these, each speaker will have 20 minutes to speak.

Discussion time will be at the end of each session (after all the presenters have spoken)

PART 1: Multilingual Texts in Translation: Practices and Theories

PAPER 1:

Title: "Multilingualism from above and below: The Politics of Canadian Multilingual Theatre"

Speaker: Eva Karpinski. York University

PAPER 2:

Title: "The Multilingual Text: The Politics and Poetics of Multilingualism"

Speaker: Chiara Montini. CNRS/ENS, Paris

PAPER 3:

Title: "A tradução de Finnegans Wake em português: multilinguismo de uma língua de chegada"

Speaker: Marie-Hélène Paret Passos. PPGL da PUCRS.

PART 2: Multilingual Mappings and the Politics of Translation Zones

PAPER 4:

Title: "Linguistic Ecologies: Multilingual Poetics, Translatio(n) and the Question of Citizenship. Examples from Canada"

Speaker: Elena Basile. University of Toronto

PAPER 5:

Title: "Spaces of Translation in the Americas: Languaging from the Borders"

Speaker: María Constanza Guzmán, York University.

PAPER 6:

Title: "Community Translation and Civil Rights in Contemporary Mexico"

Speaker: Danielle Zaslavsky. Colegio de México.

PART 3: Pedagogies of Multilingualism

PAPER 7:

Title: "breaking SWEat: the place of translation in critical approaches to teaching linguistically diverse students"

Speaker: Dunja Baus and Paola Bohorquez. York University.

PAPER 8:

Title: "Translation Thresholds in the Pedagogies of Intercomprehension and Multilingualism"

Speaker: Clorinda Donato and Cedric Oliva, California State University, Long Beach.

PAPER 9:

Title: "Multilingualism and translation in literature and visual arts in pedagogical strategies and civic education projects"

Speaker: Antonietta Sanna, University of Pisa

-Panel Conclusion

 

PAPER TITLES, ABSTRACTS AND BIONOTES

PART 1: Multilingual Texts in Translation: Practices and Theories

PAPER 1:

Title: "Multilingualism from above and below: The Politics of Canadian Multilingual Theatre"

Speaker: Eva Karpinski. York University

Abstract: Despite the fact that most societies are multilingual, monolingualism is perceived as the norm, much the same as national languages are viewed as unitary rather than heteroglot. Mandated Canadian bilingualism confirms rather than disproves the monolingual nature of the modern liberal nation-state with its policy of multiculturalism without multilingualism. However, multilingualism itself is structured in relations of domination, and not all multilingualisms are created equal. In multilingual contexts, languages are deployed not just horizontally, that is, in synchronic contiguity, or next to each other, but also vertically, one above another, reflecting stratified hierarchies of extra-linguisitic agency and symbolic power. We must consider these stratifications when we try to account for unequal vectors of cultural exchange and uneven flows of translation and non-translation that operate in multilingualism. Looking at the scene of Canadian multilingual theatre, where very little of local production by linguisitically minoritized communities ever gets translated into one of the dominant two languages, I want to reflect on different valences of multilingualism and translation in the geopolitical and cultural space fractured by colonial legacies and uneven paths of migration and globalization. Following Alison Phipps, I distinguish between multilingualism "from above," linked to economic privilege, free mobility, and commodity exchange, and multilingualism "from below," associated with "minor" languages, non- marketability, and invisibility. Given the richness of multilingual theatre in Canada, on mainstream, fringe, and community stages, I will focus on some selected productions that explore the challenges and contradictions of living in the post-Babel world. On the one hand, we have Robert Lepage's experimental, multilingual, and multi-media approach to theatre, or such Dora-winning performances as RETURN (The Sarajevo project) an UBUNTU (The Cape Town Project) by Ahuri Theatre, which since 2005 has programmatically been placing "people, cultures, languages, and ideas in a creative space." On the other hand, we witness the emergence of community-based, grassroots cultural productions that explore differences across and within multilingual groups, such as the Toronto annual Hindustani Drama festival, organized by the Indian diasporic playwright Danish Jawaid. All these phenomena must be distinguished from the uses of Indigenous languages in Aboriginal theatrical performances. Rather than softening the hard edges of difference in a global spread of equivalences, multilingualism "form below" embraces radical heterogeneity and incommensurability, radically confronting the meaning of ethnicized, hyphenated multiculturalism. However, at the same time, these minoritized forms of multilingualism throw into high relief the selective cultural politics of translation that privileges Canada's official bilingualism, even if the balance between French and English is tilted toward the latter.

Bionote: Eva C. Karpinski is Associate Professor of Gender and Women's Studies at York University. She has published articles on autobiography, translation, feminist theory, autoethnography, trauma, micro-cosmopolitanism, transnationalism, and multiculturalism. She is editor of Pens of Many Colours: A Canadian Reader, an anthology of multicultural writing. Her book on Canadian and American immigrant women's narratives, called Borrowed Tongues: Life Writing, Migration, and Translation, was published in 2012. She also co-edited Trans/Acting Culture, Writing, and Memory: Essays in Honour of Barbara Godard (2013). In 2013, she was Visiting Professor in the Summer School on Multilingualism at the University of Mannheim, Germany.

PAPER 2:

Title: "The Multilingual Text: The Politics and Poetics of Multilingualism"

Speaker: Chiara Montini. CNRS/ENS, Paris

Abstract: Translating a Bilingual Text: from Theory to practice As a scholar who works on translation theory and multilingualism, and as a translator who translates literary texts, I often face some aporetical issues: theory doesn't always apply to the practice of translation. In particular, I tackle the question of how to translate a multilingual text. Generally speaking, the translation of a multilingual text challenges the conditions of readability and transparency of translation itself and requires a plural relationship to language. No monolingual schemes are allowed. Rainier Grutman mentions four different ways of translating a multilingual text: non- translation, suppression, substitution, and transfer. Although recent theories of translation encourage a translation that doesn't suffocate and/or alter the source text's multilingualism, the translated text doesn't always comply with this theoretical point of view. Why is it so difficult to translate "multilingually"? In this presentation, I will speak about my experience of theorizing and translating a "bilingual text", that is a text that has already been translated once by the author and whose last version is his/her own translation. Such a text might be looked at as having, so to say, two "originals." Even if this text may seem perfectly monolingual (notwithstanding the impossibility of this statement), the text exists in two (mono)languages and is thus multilingual. In this case, what is the translator in a third language supposed to do? Does she have to translate the first or the second version? Does she have to mix up the two texts as if they were a unique text? Finally, how can the translation "translate" the bilingualism of the text(s)? I have tried to provide theoretical answers to these questions in my published works, where I propose different methods to approach a bilingual text. One of these essays, based on my experience as a translator into Italian of Beckett's novel Mercier et/and Camier, shows the constraints I had to face (the publisher's demands, the potential reader, my own biases, etc.). I began to translate Mercier et/and Camier by adopting an "unconventional" and "uncomfortable" methodology (drawing on my own theoretical works) because it had the advantage to let the reader figure out how Beckett's bilingual text works. But I gradually switched to a much more comfortable and conventional translation, closer to the author's first version (intended as "the original"), more "readable" and "acceptable" for the publisher who refused my "unusual" theoretical propositions. Finally, in my upcoming translation, except for some shy hints in the text, only my introduction informs the reader that the source text is bilingual. I have thus erased multilingualism even if my goal was exactly the opposite. I will show the path that has brought me from a challenging theoretical position to a much more tamed and target-oriented translation in order to explain the reasons for this choice. I will ask: How can we overcome our prejudices about translation when the decisional role of the translator is far from being recognized? Where does the translator's freedom begin and where does it end?

Bionote: Chiara Montini is a scholar and a translator. She wrote several articles and edited a book on Samuel Beckett. She also wrote a monograph on his bilingualism and the translation of his bilingual work: "La bataille du soliloque' Genèse de la poétique bilingue de Samuel Beckett (1929-1947). She is presently working on self-translation, multilingualism and translation through the works of some significant writers.

PAPER 3:

Title: "A tradução de Finnegans Wake em português: multilinguismo de uma língua de chegada"

Speaker: Marie-Hélène Paret Passos. PPGL da PUCRS.

Abstract: Antoine Berman argued that linguistic position marks the translator in his relationship to languages and his maternal language. Donaldo Schüler, writer and translator of Joyce's novel, Finnegans Wake, in Portuguese, appreciates languages and masters many: Greek, Italian, Spanish, German, Hebrew, and English. It is this multilingual substrate that supports his translation process and is also from it that the translator sets his discourse, imbued with multilingualism. In this paper I will analyze aspects of the 11 notebooks of Schüler's translation work, in order to show how the process of (re) creation of Joyce's (multi) text language into Schüler's (multi) text language takes place.

In one of the notebook's comments, Schüler writes: "The narrator addresses the Babel writers. As there was a confusion of languages, there was also confusion of texts. Diversification never stops. Writing keeps moving." This position opens a path to the emergence of a third language or a third degree of language that appears in the source text as much as in the translated text.

In the Joycean text, an exasperated process of linguistic overlay transforms the English of the source language, and provides the translator with a text that is given to read in a unique language, that implies a prototypical task of reading and translation, which imposes the necessary invention of new words that will ultimately enrich the target language, Portuguese. Yet, is still possible to say that the target language is, indeed, Portuguese? How is it equally possible to say that the source language was English? We will concentrate on the analysis of this so called target language to try to emphasize its multilingual features that make it "language-more-than-one". And, if Joyce wrote in a multiplied language, creating some sixty languages and neologisms, Schüler, the translator who transcreates the text, must follow in Joyce's multilingual footsteps. This process leaves, in his comments, traces of multilingual and multi-shaped passages. Finally, we will try to characterize the translating language as a sort of third language, which, in turn, also nourishes the translation process because it shapes the target text. It sustains the translated discourse, it hosts and creates it out of the norm and linguistic system of the target language. As previous readings are mobilized at each new reading, at every new translation the languages known by the translator are mobilized in a kind of fusion, creative, innovative, and most of all, unique.

Bionote: Doctorate and post-doctorate in Letters. Professor of PPGL PUCRS. Research on Genetic Criticism and Literary Translation.

[1] By Hidden Curriculum we understand the system of values, attitudes, and principles which reinforces the unequal distribution of cultural capital and which is implicitly conveyed through injunctions which are hard to resist and identify because they are "silent and insidious, insisting and insinuating" (Bourdieu 51).

[2] Matsuda, Paul. "The Myth of Linguistic Homogeneity in U.S. College Composition." College English 68.6 (2006): 637-651.

PART 2: Multilingual Mappings and the Politics of Translation Zones

PAPER 4:

Title: "Linguistic Ecologies: Multilingual Poetics, Translatio(n) and the Question of Citizenship. Examples from Canada"

Speaker: Elena Basile. University of Toronto

Abstract: This presentation explores the work of three Canadian poets who grapple with the existential and political implications of bearing witness to violent geographies of linguistic border zones, where the fuzzy boundaries between multilingual practices and heavily ideologized vectors of translation constitute intractable realities of everyday life. Specifically, I look at Gail Scott's The Obituary (2010), Erin Moure' The Unmentioable (2012), and Rachel Zolf's Neighbour Procedure (2010) as texts that perform alternative re-inscriptions of boundaries of corporeality, indigeneity and (exilic) citizenship, through a purposefully jagged staging of stratified linguistic diversity. This staging, I argue, eschews essentialist inscriptions of corporeality, citizenship and belonging, and enables readers to start thinking through new ecologies of being, unmoored from the historical violence of dominant territorial anchorings of cultural identity. I am particularly interested in showing how Scott, Mourè and Zolf probe how bodies and lands are welded into hierarchies of legitimate and abject existence via a poetics that makes visible border zones of underworld "translatio" (Apter) – that is, border zones of linguistic seeping, clashing and re-routing whose affective charge powerfully surfaces the open wounds of genocidal histories haunting life in geopolitical regions as diverse as North-America/Turtle Island (Scott, The Obituary), Palestine/Israel (Zolf, Neighbour Procedure) and the Ukraine/Poland border (Mourè, The Unmentioable). While seeming written in English, all three of the texts I examine very quickly undercut monolingual dominance by means of a range of techniques (sudden insertions of foreign characters, words or word-strings in a sentence; use of hybrid word formations; apparent juxtapositions of translation), which mobilize the reader's uneven multilingual competence while simultaneously frustrating her hermeneutic desire for full textual comprehension and mastery. All three poets oblige us to sift through the solderings and rifts between the constitutive opacity of multilingual inscriptions and translation's promise of transparency and infinite circulation of meaning. Each text's jagged multilingualism enacts the drama of the violence and of the failures of translation – especially when the latter is employed in the service of epistemological mastery and political appropriation, typical of settler-colonial contexts and historically contested border zones. At the end of my paper, I will argue that a potential space of poetic healing is made visible through these poetries' insistence on the opaque ontic weight of language difference, one that demands a particular kind of ethical approach to language on the part of readers, which can be understood as a mode of bearing witness.

Bionote: Elena Basile (Ph.D.) is a translator and sessional lecturer in the Sexual Diversity Studies Program at the University of Toronto, and in the English Department at York University. She writes on translation and multilingual Canadian poetries (essays in New Voices in Translation Studies, Open Letter, Canada and Beyond) and has translated into Italian Nicole Brossard's novel Le désert mauve (2011). She is a founding member of the Multiligualism Research Group at York University, and collaborates regularly with artists and academics in Europe and Canada, exploring ecologies of linguistic diversity in contexts of cultural displacement and hybridization.

PAPER 5:

Title: "Spaces of Translation in the Americas: Languaging from the Borders"

Speaker: María Constanza Guzmán, York University.

Abstract: Linguistic heterogeneity and fluidity are often overdetermined by fixed national cartographies. In the Americas, spaces of language heterogeneity are often obscured in national discourses informed by the geopolitical borders that condition national languages, frame nations and communities, and delimit them culturally and linguistically. National cartographies inform identity discourses which often privilege homogeneity, fail to incorporate contact zones, and result in a national consciousness that is often at odds with the identitarian possibilities emerging from lived linguistic and cultural multiplicity on the ground. The spaces of language heterogeneity are, inherently, spaces of translation as a praxis of intercultural negotiations. In this paper I investigate cultural and editorial projects in the Americas in which multilingualism is transacted. I look at spaces of linguistic multiplicity—including various border spaces, as well as the Caribbean—as sites of multilingual existence where notions of nation, identity and language are both intertwined and contested. Specifically, I take the case of cultural projects that originate in these "spaces of translation" in the Americas, which claim their relation to these multilingual spaces, and participate in one way or another in negotiating linguistic heterogeneity. I focus on the ways in which practices of translation, and non- translation, relate to the transacting of cultural heterogeneity. Looking at specific cases—e.g., editorial projects such as cultural journals—I identify a range of narrative practices that relate to the negotiation of linguistic difference, focusing on translation and also relating it to various forms of narrative hybridity and languaging. In so doing, I explore the possibilities of placing translation within a larger frame of multilingualism; in turn, I posit translation as a conceptual possibility to understand multilingualism. In addition, and taking the opportunity of having done a situated comparative examination of translation and multilingual narrative practices, I also seek to illuminate the way in which regional images and notions of space specific to the Americas emerge from such practices. As a whole, I see the editorial projects as devices through which regional imaginaries—e.g., the idea of "Latin America"— are constructed and produced via narrative and linguistic plurality. This is done with the goal of outlining cartographies emerging from translation praxis, and seeing whether these perpetuate colonial mappings or engage space productively, exploring counterhegemonic and decolonial possibilities.

Bionote: María Constanza Guzmán is Associate Professor in the School of Translation and the Hispanic Studies Department at York University. She teaches in the graduate programs in Translation Studies and Humanities, and coordinates the Research Group in Translation and Transcultural Contact. Her publications include articles and the book Gregory Rabassa's Latin American Literature: A Translator's Visible Legacy. She also co-translated, with Joshua

M. Price, the novel La sombra de Heidegger, and co-edited (with D. Folaron and M. Feltrin- Morris) the volume Translation and Literary Studies: Homage to Marilyn Gaddis Rose. She is editor-in-chief of the journal Tusaaji: A Translation Review.

PAPER 6:

Title: "Community Translation and Civil Rights in Contemporary Mexico"

Speaker: Danielle Zaslavsky. Colegio de México.

Abstract: In post-revolutionary Mexico, national identity was defined on the basis of hibridity (mestizaje). While the indigenous history was granted an important part in the official historical narrative of the Mexican past, cultural and linguistic diversity, which are characteristics of rural areas, kept being associated to poverty and underdevelopment, and were thus considered as obstacles for modernity. Things seem to have changed today. In spite of having imposed Spanish as the national language in the public sphere, Mexican official discourse has provided a list of over 60 indigenous languages. Admitting linguistic diversity requires the implementation of translation policies, in particular, in community settings. Some public institutions have undertaken initiatives for training translators and interpreters of indigenous languages, who more often than not, belong to an indigenous community. There is a lot to be done, and this is only the beginning of a long process. In this context, translation is presented as a State task. Public institutions are responsible for guaranteeing that every indigenous citizen's rights are protected, whether s/he is being accused or is the plaintiff in a judicial process. However, restricting translation between a dominant language, i.e. Spanish, and a dominated language, i.e. indigenous languages, to legal setting provides a highly reductionist representation, both of translation practices and of indigenous languages.

Translating and interpreting in conflictual settings, that is, those involving legal and political action, has been studied and analyzed by a number of translation studies' scholars (Mona Baker, Jan Bloomaert, Ian Mason, Robert F. Barsky, among others). These studies have foregrounded the social, cultural, and linguistic power differentials, and the assymetrical interactions that take place between the agents involved in these translation/interpreting processes. On the basis of some case studies, this paper will focus on analyzing the discourses articulated through translation in legal settings in contemporary Mexico. The study will be instrumental in showing how translation is used to build a social representation, both of the languages involved and of the translator's task.

Bionote: Studies in Political Discourse, Media Discourse, and Translation and Political Discourse. Last Publications: -2013: "Cuando traducción e interpretación se contradicen", en Nayelli Castro Ramirez (coord.), Traducción, identidad y nacionalismo en Latinoamérica, Bonilla Artigas/ Conaculta/Fonca, México -2013: Nayelli Castro, Danielle Zaslavsky, "México", Francisco Lafarga y Luis Pejenaute (dir.) Diccionario histórico de la traducción en Hispanoamérica, iberoamericana/ Vervuert Madrid -2013: "Las traducciones de la declaración de independencia de Estados Unidos de América en Hispanoamérica", en Alfredo Avila, Jordana Dym, Erica Pani (coord), Las declaraciones de independencia, El Colegio de México/Universidad Autónoma de México, México.

PART 3: Pedagogies of Multilingualism

PAPER 7

Title: De-positioning Standard Written English: A Literacy Experiment in Linguistic Crossings.

Speaker: Dunja Baus and Paola Bohorquez.

Abstract: The increasingly visible and audible presence of multilingual students, English as a second language learners, and speakers of non-privileged varieties of English in Canadian university classrooms has shifted the terms of the debate regarding the effectiveness of traditional Standard Written English (SWE) pedagogies. Writing curricula across Canadian Universities increasingly incorporate readings and teaching materials that, either in content or form, challenge the standard language ideology, while vernacular and cross-cultural texts have become regular additions to the previously carefully guarded canon of "English Literature." While this diversification of the curriculum has been of critical importance for the inclusion and historical recognition of the place of other Englishes and linguistic traditions in the make-up of Canadian society, these problematizations have produced little to no change in current writing pedagogical strategies which continue to be grammar and correctness-oriented, and, for the most part, product-focused. We argue that these pedagogical innovations have had a very limited effect on the writing classroom's hidden curriculum[1], where the unquestioned authority of the native English speaker, the myth of the inherently superior nature of the Standard variety, and the notion that linguistic diversity needs to be contained rather than engaged[2] remain dominant and unquestioned. It is in this gap between the explicit and the hidden curriculum that deeply entrenched and oppressive language attitudes are maintained and reproduced. These experiences have prompted a pilot project that produced pedagogical methodologies that incorporate translation strategies and metalinguistic skills to the teaching of writing outside of the "deficit paradigm" inherited by TESL educators. In this presentation, we will showcase the students' use of translative competencies and ability to shuttle between languages through an examination of their writing pieces and metacritical essays on the pedagogical experience. Grounded on Derrida's translation theory, our project builds on current efforts to release linguistically diverse students from monolingual instructional models by approaching the Standard as both multiple and incomplete and therefore susceptible to deformations, transformations, and miswritings. This process of crossing between languages involves not only semantic and syntactical registers but also grammatical constraints, rhetorical modes, and genres.We are particularly interested in thinking with and through the following questions: What are the pedagogical effects of systematically examining and actively promoting the linguistic and inter-semiotic modes of transfer that multilingual students intuitively practice? How do such translative strategies impact students' approaches to English and writing? How does a broader understanding of translation that considers transfers between academic and vernacular languages and discourses and between diverse rhetorical patterns impact the teaching and learning of Standard Written English in mixed classrooms?

Bionote: Paola Bohórquez holds a Ph.D in Social and Political Thought from York University, where she teaches in the Writing Department. Her dissertation examines the psychic, textual and ethical dimensions of linguistic displacement. She has published in the Journal of Intercultural Studies, Synthesis, and in the collections On and Off the Page: Mapping Place in Text and Culture and American Multicultural Studies. Dunja Baus is a Doctoral Candidate in the Department of English at York University. She teaches in the English and Writing Departments at York University and is currently working on her dissertation entitled "Life, Writing: Re-Citing Female Friendship—A Canadian Bioautography."

PAPER 8:

Title: "Translation Thresholds in the Pedagogies of Intercomprehension and Multilingualism"

Speaker: Clorinda Donato and Cedric Oliva,

Abstract: Since 2009, California State University, Long Beach has been engaged in the application of multilingual pedagogies in the teaching of French and Italian for Spanish speakers courses in a three-course series. Additionally, a course on the Intercomprehension of the Romance Languages has been added to the curriculum for students who know English and one Romance language. Drs. Donato and Oliva have each taught the French and Italian for Spanish Speakers courses as well as train new instructors in the multilingual pedagogies used. They have also team taught the Intercomprehension of the Romance Languages course in which 22 students were enrolled. This presentation will report on the results from their ongoing research in the pedagogies of Intercomprehension and Multilingualism and the role of translation. Reflecting the European influence of its continent of origin, Intercomprehension and the materials used to teach it have glossed over the role of translation in the acquisition of passive reading or listening comprehension skills in the materials they have created (Escudé 2012, Bonvino and Caddéo 2012), due to the philosophy of Intercomprehension, which focuses primarily on 1) the transparency of language and the purported ability of speakers of related languages to understand each other with little to no effort; 2) the "native" or "near native" quality of the Romance language that functions as the reference language in each individual case; 3) the exclusion of English from the mix of languages being taught and considered. Over the past year a writing team led by Donato and Oliva has been developing fresh materials for both courses. In these courses, translation is actively used as a strategy for acquiring meaning among the various languages. The translation that is enacted and elicited emerges from a place of translanguaging. Since our students are constantly moving between English and the Romance language(s) they speak, which is more often than not, Spanish as a heritage language, they bring the other Romance languages they are learning in both the French and Italian for Spanish speakers courses and the Intercomprehension course into the translanguaging they already practice. They are very comfortable with translanguaging translation and they use it to extract meaning as they move among languages. Our presentation will present data from the student work we have collected; we will also demonstrate the translanguaging, translation pedagogies that we have incorporated into our courseware for French and Italian for Spanish Speakers. Finally, the intercultural aspects of our methods will be considered. We will attempt to address questions related to linguistic and cultural specificity as a function of these pedagogical thresholds of translation, its loss and/or deferral to new, transcultural and translingual forms.

Bionote: Clorinda Donato is the George L. Graziadio Chair of Italian Studies at California State University, Long Beach, Chevalier dans l'Ordres des Palmes Académiques and Professor of French and Italian. She is the Principal Investigator for the three-year NEH grant, "French and Italian for Spanish Speakers". Cedric Oliva is the Language Coordinator for the Department of Romance, German, Russian, Languages and Literatures. He teaches French and Italian for Spanish Speakers. He has also taught Intercomprehension, Second Language Acquisition, and Teaching Methodology at California State University, Long Beach.

PAPER 9:

Title: "Multilingualism and translation in literature and visual arts in pedagogical strategies and civic education projects"

Speaker: Antonietta Sanna, University of Pisa

Abstract: Multilingualism and translation are undeniably becoming the language of the world, a necessity that cannot be ignored, and the foundation of all relations in the global society. After literature, which for a long time has invented a language permeated with adaptations and has even turned translation into a narrative theme, contemporary art is integrating it into its discourse now.The works of various writers like Abdelfattah Kilito, Edouard Glissant, Patrick Chamoiseau show that multilingualism and translation are at the root of a ceaseless quest of the other. A lot of writers produce multilingual texts conceived like confrontation, conversation and interlocution. Therefore at present, in this field of research, after the concepts like hospitality or identity/alterity, is urgent to introduce the concept of dia-logos. Dia-logos: this interesting notion allows us to analyze the use of multilingualism and translation in literature and visual arts in pedagogical strategies and civic education in Italy and France. The French artist, Clara Halter, has recently produced a work of art through which she underlines that in today's world translation, understood as a step taken in the direction of the other, is the only way to step out conflicts and to build an exchange between individuals. Her work of art, entitled « Pathways to peace", is made up of a collection of sheets of paper on which the word "peace" is written in several hundred languages, each of them exalting the ornamental aspect of its alphabet. For Halter translating is travelling from one language to the next, and the artist taking the first step, making the first move of an invitation to settle in Other's house, to share the "common house" of our planet Earth. Marco Nereo Rotelli is an Italian artist that works in the same direction when he paints small canvases with forgotten languages: the Rapa Nui pictograms, the Bushman graffiti, and the symbols of Native American tribes. The artist reveals a world of figures and magic between the shadow zones of contemporariness where forgotten languages still survive. The golden doors (2010) are the central work in Marco Nereo Rotelli's research. On each door alphabets of the world and verses of contemporary poets are painted. Save the Poetry, created for the 53rd International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia in defense of minor languages, is a project to build a bridge for multilingual dialogue connecting cultures and peoples. We will consider too the role of "Site specific projects" in civic education realized in Italy and in France in collaboration with artists that works in multilingual perspective.

Bionote: Antonietta Sanna teaches French Literature in the University of Pisa. She has carried out her research in an eminently philological-literary field. She participates in the integral diplomatic edition of the Cahiers of Paul Valéry. She is a member of the Institut Des Textes et Manuscrits Modernes, at the CNRS in Paris. She studies question of gender and relations between text and image. She has translated the important writings of Georges Semprun and Louis-Ferdinand Céline. She works with " Multilinguisme, traduction, création" group in French Institut for genetics studies. She has published articles about multilingualism and translation in literature.

-Panel Conclusion

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Translation, Literature, Contemporaneity and Transcultural Representations
Maria Aparecida Salgueiro, University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Research in the last decades has shown that translation is not only an interlingual process, but fundamentally, an intercultural activity. In the contemporary world, transcultural representation of different orders is recurrent. The approach to cultural transference in translation, focusing on the translator's ability to "negotiate" the understanding of specificities of cultures and their differences, stands out among research objects in the field. The globalization of communication, multiculturalism, tradition and cultural transmission give rise to constant ideological debates, fueled by politics. In such scenery, the role of Translation in propagating cultural diversity is fundamental. In transcultural representations, mediation is performed by translators and interpreters. Following up the widening trends in Literary Theory along the second half of the XXth century, the nature of literary study has changed meaningfully, up to contemporary 'World Literature'. In such panorama, Literature today is seen as a privileged discursive field for interdisciplinary study. Compared Literature and Translation Studies intertwine voicing possibilities and modes of analysis unthinkable of so far. Under such perspective, this panel gathers works that focus on narratives by/on peoples and social groups who are subjugated and/or marginalized in contemporaneity in political, social and cultural terms, as well as on those that question established stereotypes of subjugated peoples and communities, ethnicities, immigrants. One of the main intriguing and challenging topics that may be a point in future research agendas in a world that discusses the African Diaspora so intensely nowadays is the one related to the translation of blackness. In other words, half of the the panel aims among other points to present research conclusions and works in progress about how blackness is/has been translated in different contexts and geographical spaces, observing power relations, processes of colonial, post-colonial and post-hegemonic identity construction, the uprising of literary canons, cultural hegemony and globalization, demythifying spaces and showing translation as an activity that occurs not in a neutral space, but inside social and political concrete situations. In this sense, this Panel takes a clear perspective of intervention, of the construction of alternatives, by bringing and/or taking back to the academic environment, dialogue and investigation in its dual condition of reflective attitude. Studies proposed by critics like Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Paul Gilroy, Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Stuart Hall, George Yúdice, David Damrosch among others to be suggested, are relevant to the debate in question. Dialogue with works by Translation Studies scholars such as Edwin Gentzler, Mary Tymoczko, Susan Bassnett, Lawrence Venuti and others will also take place.

For informal enquiries: [cidasal3ATgmailDOTcom]

MARIA APARECIDA ANDRADE SALGUEIRO is International Visiting Professor at the Dartmouth College (USA) since 2011. She is Associate Professor at the State University of Rio de Janeiro (UERJ), where she is Coordinator of the Center for Translation and Intercultural Studies, and Professor and Supervisor in Masters and PhD courses in African-American, Afro-Brazilian Literatures, and Intercultural Translation. She had Post Doctorate Studies at the University of London (UCL)-2008. She has been publishing extensively and is the author of "Escritoras Negras Contemporaneas: Estudo de Narrativas - Estados Unidos e Brasil" ("Contemporary Black Women Writers: Narrative Studies - USA and Brazil").

 

 

 

 

See other thematic panels

PANEL STRUCTURE

SESSION PLAN

Each paper is allocated with a 20 minutes time slot.

In this Panel discussion time will be used at the end of each session

INTRODUCTION SECTION: 10 minutes

PART I: MINORITY LANGUAGES AND MIGRANT WRITING IN TRANSLATION 

PAPER 1:

Title: Minority languages and translation - the "Camilleri case" in Brazil

Speaker: Solange Carvalho (USP)

PAPER 2:

Title: Migrant writing and a much-anticipated return: translation as reconciliation with the lost mother tongue

Speaker: Tiziana Nannavecchia (University of Ottawa)

PAPER 3:

Title: Translation, Migration and the Problem of Narrating the Self

Speaker: Aurelia Klimkiewicz (Glendon College)

DISCUSSION TIME: 30 minutes

PART II: TRANSLATING BLACK LITTERATURE 1

PAPER 4

Title: The face of (non) political engagement in Brazilian translations of Native Son, by Richard Wright

Speaker: Lauro Maia Amorim (UNESP)

PAPER 5:

Title: Afro-Brazilian Literature in Translation: Ponciá Vicêncio in the North-American Context

Speaker: Marcela Iochem Valente (UERJ)

PAPER 6:

Title: Translated literature and power relations: Beloved in the Brazilian cultural context

Speaker: Luciana Mesquita (CEFET/RJ-PUC-Rio)

PAPER 7:

Title: Dalit Literatures in Translation: the Politics of Humour, Swearing and Obscenity

Speaker: Hephzibah Israel (University of Edinburgh)

PAPER 8:

Title: Race beyond the disgrace: Black women translate themselves into contemporary literature

Speaker: Felipe Fanuel Xavier Rodrigues (UERJ/Fulbright/CAPES)

PAPER 9:

Title: The instant of the poetic glimpse – Black women's voices and representations of childhood in the African Diaspora

Speaker: Susana Fuentes (UERJ/FAPERJ/CAPES)

DISCUSSION TIME: 20 minutes

WRAP-UP SECTION: 10 minutes

PAPER TITLES, ABSTRACTS AND BIONOTES

PAPER 1:

Title: Minority languages and translation - the "Camilleri case" in Brazil

Speaker: Solange Carvalho (USP)

Abstract: Italy is characterized by the coexistence of standard Italian and other languages, nowadays called "minority or regional languages", and in Italy itself known as "dialects", such as Sicilian, Piedmontese, Calabrese, Friulan. In Italy there has always been a suggestive output of literary works written either in part or fully in one of these dialects. In his work "Passione e ideologia" (1960), Pier Paolo Pasolini analyses the strong trend of dialect-written poetry produced in the first decades of the 20th century, and also mentions some prose works, including among these latter Carlo Emilio Gadda's novels, with their innovative use of Italian and many dialects, besides the use of technical lexicon and terms adopted in bureaucratic texts. During the two last decades of the last century, Italian literature witnessed a renewed interest in the depiction of regional characteristics, including the presence of dialects, both in poetry and in prose. And in the 1990s one writer started publishing novels which, ere long, became the focus of attention both from critics and the general public, first in Italy, and soon afterwards abroad: Andrea Camilleri. Born in Sicily, his works are characterized by the highly unconventional use of both Sicilian and Italian languages, which became known as his "hybrid language" and helped to strengthen the Sicilian language that seemed to have been losing its power in Sicily, thanks to the major influence of standard Italian among the younger generations. This "hybrid language" also became the most distinctive point of Camilleri's works all over the world, and it challenges translators with one very important question: how to convey to foreign readers, in cultures so different from the Italian, the writer's "Sicilianised" Italian? If we consider the linguistic and social situation in Brazil, we understand that here this coexistence of one standard language and several regional languages does not exist. This can be seen as one major issue for translators, since we have to find different strategies to convey the hybridization adopted by Camilleri and at the same time, produce a text that can be appealing to the public as a whole. Translation studies have analyzed different proposals for presenting what does not belong to the standard language, with meaningful insights offered by Chapdelaine (1994), Lane-Mercier (1997) and Pym (2000), among others. Considering the many possible approaches to the use of Sicilian language in Camilleri's work – sociolinguistics, stylistics, linguistic – and having in mind the arguments discussed by Eco in "Dire quasi la stessa cosa"/"Experiences in Translation" (2000), that since it is not possible to present all the characteristics of the source language in a given translated text, we propose in the first place an interdisciplinary analysis related to the camillerian style, besides a study of characteristics of non-standard Portuguese, and then we'll proceed to an analysis of chosen excerpts of some camillerian novels, allowing a deeper evaluation of the possibilities and strategies for the translation of minority languages into Portuguese.

Bionote: SOLANGE CARVALHO (USP) is a translator, who is currently doing post-doctorate research in the Translation Studies Program (FFLCH/USP), analyzing the translations of Andrea Camilleri's novels into Portuguese. She earned PhD degree in Morphology and Portuguese Language, analyzing neologisms in the prose work of Brazilian writer Ariano Suassuna (USP, 2011). She has a Master's degree in Literary Studies with a proposal for the translation of Yorkshire dialect found in the novel "Wuthering Heights" into Portuguese (2007). Her main research interests are non-standard language, translation of varieties into Portuguese and neologisms in Brazilian Portuguese.

PAPER 2:

Title: Migrant writing and a much-anticipated return: translation as reconciliation with the lost mother tongue

Speaker: Tiziana Nannavecchia (University of Ottawa)

Abstract: Cultural practices born out of contexts of itinerancy invite us to reconsider the way selves are created and transfigured across physical and cultural borders and boundaries. More than statistics or economics-related data about migration and its actors, artistic productions –– and more specifically literature — are where transnational identities are best formed and depicted. In fact, regardless of the type of narration and how fictitious characters may or may not be, the narratorial voice in migrant literature reveals a lot about the experience of leaving a homeland to settle and adjust into a new, foreign environment. Recently, as a consequence of the steep rise in world migration and coincidental to the increasing interest in the subject of ethnicity and cultural hybridity, there has been a noticeable growth in attention to the narratives dealing with migrancy. These literary productions are considered emblematic of how (cultural) identities are built and relationships between self and others develop in situations of multi/transculturalism. Furthermore, the increasing interest in migrant literature seems correlated to the rise of Cultural Studies, which have nurtured the ongoing debate around the dichotomies of I/Other and familiarity/foreignness at the core of our age of migration. A parallel interest in Cultural Studies has also been observed within the field of Translation Studies starting in the 1980s, the so-called 'cultural turn'; meanwhile, as suggested by Susan Bassnett, a 'translation turn' in Cultural Studies has been mutually taking place. Within the framework of the concepts of cultural translation and translation of cultures, which are raising an increasing interest in the current internationalized and interdisciplinary field of Translation Studies, the proposed study discusses the role played by the translation act in disseminating and promoting itinerant (minority) voices – which represent some of the most valuable works of our times, but are often confined to geographically limited areas – across geographical/linguistic/cultural world frontiers. Supported by textual evidence (specifically, linguistic and thematic elements) from Italian-Canadian migrant narratives, the present work intends to support the claim that translation may finally represent, for some of these authors, the much anticipated and rarely fulfilled dream of returning to the (idealized) motherland. This 'return migration' is not only a rapprochement to the native soil, but it can also be read as a reconciliation with the lost mother tongue, symbolized by the translation of the English and/or French language Italian-Canadian migrant narratives into the abandoned Italian language.

Bionote: TIZIANA NANNAVECCHIA (University of Ottawa) is a candidate in the doctoral program in Translation Studies with Specialization in Canadian Studies at the University of Ottawa, Canada, researching in the field of literary translation and multilingualism, with a focus on Italian-Canadian literature and its fate in Italian translation. She is Research Assistant at the School of Translation and Interpretation of the same institution.

PAPER 3:

Title: Translation, Migration and the Problem of Narrating the Self

Speaker: Aurelia Klimkiewicz (Glendon College)

Abstract: Since the cultural turn in Translation Studies in the 1990s, the emphasis on cultural contact and exchange has allowed to "unpack[...] the regimes of difference that shape our identity" (Karpinski 2013: 11). Considered an ideologically charged activity, translation becomes context-dependent and is consequently investigated in light of the conditions of its production that reveal historically structured power imbalances, as well as mechanisms that maintain cultural boundaries and established hierarchies. Additionally, the recent mobility turn (Sheller & Urry 2006) has emphasized the relevance of translation in the context of social and cultural instability provoked, for instance, by exile or migration. In such a context, translation plays a crucial role in both the production of the narrative of displacement (sense of belonging) and in the reconfiguration of the self (identity). Translation thus actively participates not only in the communication between the self and the foreign, but more importantly in the meaning making that is processed through an enlarged network of languages and cultural connections, including the context of the host society, the country of origin or other ethnic entities. Over time, this network becomes a dense space of intersubjective adjustments that requires translation as a main tool of exchange with multiple others. If 'sameness' relies on the common origin (space, language, history, etc.), in contrast, difference and multiplicity have to rely on translation because only the latter can establish a connection with others who are foreigners, as well as with the altered uprooted self that strives for a sense of belonging and aims to rebuild social ties in the new environment. Therefore, the presentation will pertain to the role that translation plays in the production of both the 'narrative of displacement' and the 'narrative identity' (Ricoeur 1990) that take place in the context of migration marked by the trauma of separation (Cyrulnik 2012). The Heideggerian grounded self ('at home') will thus be contrasted with the scenario of the uprooted self that is situated in 'the spatiality of synchronicity' (Sakai 1997) and that deals with tensions between 'the here' and 'the there', and the overall instability of subject position, as well as the problem of intergenerational transmission of cultural memory. Paper will conclude with the discussion of the ethics of non-translation.

Bionote: AURELIA KLIMKIEWICZ (Glendon College) teaches at the School of Translation at Glendon College, York University, Canada. Her research interests include theory of translation, the hermeneutics of the multilingual self, the ethics of translation, and the aesthetics of exile. Her current work focuses on translation in the multilingual context, more specifically on the identity and mobility of the translator. She has authored numerous articles and book chapters on translation theory, migrant identity, self-translation, and translation of francophone minority literature into Polish.

PAPER 5:

Title: Afro-Brazilian Literature in Translation: Ponciá Vicêncio in the North-American Context

Speaker: Marcela Iochem Valente (UERJ)

Abstract: This paper intends to investigate some aspects related to the translation of Conceição Evaristo's "Ponciá Vicêncio" (2003) into English. This novel, written by an Afro-Brazilian female writer, was translated by Paloma Martinez-Cruz – Assistant Professor of Latino Cultural and Literary Studies at Ohio State University – and published in the United States in 2007, by Host Publications. Considering that translation is not merely an interlingual process, but that it also involves many cultural issues, in addition to the fact that the systemic place occupied by a certain work in its source culture is not necessarily repeated in the target culture due to political, social and cultural differences, this paper seeks to understand the systemic places occupied by Conceição Evaristo and her work both in the Brazilian and North-American cultural polysystems. This study takes into account aspects such as the motivation to perform the translation of this work, the critical reception of "Ponciá Vicêncio" in the source and target cultures, as well as the systemic places occupied by the writer and her work in the cultural polysystems of origin and reception. This investigation intends to clarify some questions such as to what extent the insertion of Afro-Brazilian literature can influence or even change the image of Brazilian literature/culture in the North-American polysystem, and the possible impact that Evaristo's image in the U.S. may have on the position she occupies in the Brazilian literary polysystem – or even in the recent establishment of an Afro-Brazilian literary system. The study of the process of insertion of Conceição Evaristo in the North-American literary polysystem via translation will be informed by the polysystem theory, as proposed by Itamar Even-Zohar, the Descriptive Translation Studies – DTS, especially by the ideas of Gideon Toury and André Lefevere, and some ideas by Lawrence Venuti on the generation and manipulation of cultural images. Thus, this paper will show how translation is inextricably intertwined with cultural, political and ideological questions.

Bionote: MARCELA IOCHEM VALENTE (UERJ) is Adjunct Professor of English at the State University of Rio de Janeiro. Her major field of interest is translation as intercultural transfer. She deals with the translation of African-American and Afro-Brazilian literary productions into Portuguese and English, respectively. She is the author of "Lorraine Hansberry and 'A Raisin in the Sun': Challenges and Trends Presented by an African-American Play" (LAP Publishing, 2010) and co-editor of "Subversive Voices Breaking Silences: Questions of Identity and Otherness in English Language Literatures" (LAP Publishing, 2012).

PAPER 6:

Title: Translated literature and power relations: Beloved in the Brazilian cultural context

Speaker: Luciana Mesquita (CEFET/RJ-PUC-Rio)

Abstract: This paper will investigate the relationship between translation and power, which includes "political control and subversion, the power of translation to construct political discourses, and the power of the translators as agents, as well as ideological aspects of culture governing translation such as discourse structures and censorship" (Tymoczko, 2007: 45). Therefore, this study will focus on the African American female author Toni Morrison and the reception of her translated literature in Brazil. Our aim is to describe the different historical contexts relative to the translations of her novel "Beloved" (1987) into Brazilian Portuguese, published under the title "Amada". The first translation was done by Evelyn Kay Massaro and launched by the publishing houses 'Best Seller' and 'Círculo do Livro', in 1989 and 1994, respectively. The second one was written by José Rubens Siqueira and published by 'Companhia das Letras' publishing company in 2007 and 2011. Our proposition will try to show how translation is related to the target language culture, values and ideology and how it changes over time. Questions as the following ones will guide our analysis: 'How are the paratexts of "Amada" constituted in its different editions?' 'How is blackness approached, especially in the case of African American English (AAE)?' 'Considering such components and the reception of "Amada", what would be the representations of Morrison and her work in Brazil?' 'Are they similar or different from the ones that can be observed in the American context?' Concerning its theoretical basis, the paper will include the ideas on translation proposed by scholars such as Bassnett and Lefevere (1990), Toury (1995), and Tymoczko (2007). Moreover, works by Hall (2003) and Ashcroft et al (2005), related to Cultural Studies – Post-Colonial Studies in particular – will be important to the discussion of the political, ideological and cultural factors involved in the translation activity.

Bionote: LUCIANA MESQUITA (CEFET/RJ-PUC-Rio) is Professor of English and Portuguese at the Federal Center for Technological Education Celso Suckow da Fonseca (CEFET/RJ). She is a PhD student at Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio) and holds a Master of Arts in Literary Theory and a Bachelor of Arts in Translation from the Federal University of Juiz de Fora (UFJF). Her research involves the relationship between translation and the target language culture, values and ideology, focusing on Toni Morrison's translated literature in Brazil.

PAPER 7:

Title: Dalit Literatures in Translation: the Politics of Humour, Swearing and Obscenity

Speaker: Hephzibah Israel (University of Edinburgh)

Abstract: The Dalit communities of India are the "blacks" of South Asia. They have historically been oppressed and marginalised by dominant sections of Indian society for centuries. Despite many efforts at political and economic restoration of the Dalit community, marginalization continues especially at a social and cultural level. From the second half of the twentieth century, Dalit writers have emerged who for the first time have been able to give voice to the oppressive conditions that they live in postcolonial India. Like Black writing from Africa and North America, Dalits have used literature and language as a tool to speak of their 'blackness'. Even now, however, much of their writing is kept out of literary canons of Indian language literatures, or postcolonial "Indian Literature" and even fewer works are deemed worthy of translation. This paper will focus on literary texts written by Dalits to pick out the literary strategies that they employ to speak of their blackness. In particular, Tamil Dalit writers use a range of non-standard Tamil language registers as a political strategy of resistance, i.e. from regional 'Dalit' dialects, colloquialisms that mark the language as 'Dalit,' themes of resistance to their use of 'black humour', swearing and obscenity. Together, these question conventions of good writing in Tamil (and Indian) literature and thus disrupt entrenched hierarchies of literary taste, social caste and political oppression. Translating their satirical writing is therefore not only challenging but itself an act of intervention, where translators must go against the grain of what is considered 'literature' in the Indian context. The paper will demonstrate how concepts of the comic from literary theory can be useful tools to study translation contexts that engage with non-standard language use. It will draw on critical theory of the comic to study the social interventionist politics of writers, translators and their audiences, i.e. how the comic can function as a powerful political tool of resistance and radical questioning. The paper will analyze how the role and visibility of the translator as mediator of marginal cultures is affected by such strategies adopted to convey non-standard language registers and literary themes.

Bionote: HEPHZIBAH ISRAEL (University of Edinburgh) is Lecturer in Translation Studies, University of Edinburgh. She has researched literary and sacred translations in the South Asian context, with particular focus on Protestant religions, language and identity politics. Her book entitled "Religious Transactions in Colonial South India: Language, Translation and the Making of Protestant Identity" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011) studies evolving attitudes to translation practices in the Tamil literary and sacred landscapes from the early eighteenth century and offers fresh perspectives on the translated Bible as an object of cultural transfer. She has also published articles on translation studies and South Asian literary cultures.

 

PAPER 8:

Title: Race beyond the disgrace: Black women translate themselves into contemporary literature

Speaker: Felipe Fanuel Xavier Rodrigues (UERJ/Fulbright/CAPES)

Abstract: One of the marked characteristics of the present-day literary production of Black women in countries where people from Africa were enslaved in the past is their commitment to cultural heritage. If both the United States of America and Brazil have been influenced by African and African descendant cultures throughout their history, it is certain that this influence has produced distinct cultural manifestations, especially when it comes to contexts that are generated by encounters forced by slavery. Taken broadly, this issue is related to African Diaspora, which is "understood in academia to imply geographical localities where Africans and Africa-descended persons have (im)migrated (forced or otherwise) and contributed to the formation of nation and national culture" (TILLIS, 2009). That is to say, the social problems from the colonial situation have not been forgotten by the contemporary African-American and Afro-Brazilian literatures in both countries. Hence, the literature of current Black writers tackles issues that are noticeable for conflicts in their respective socio-cultural contexts. This paper is primarily devoted to the works of the Black female writers Maya Angelou (1928-2014) in the United States and Mãe Beata de Yemonjá (1931-) in Brazil, investigating the religious implications embedded in their works. As this is research in Comparative Literature, the purpose is to draw comparisons and distances between their respective texts and contexts. Close attention is given to the images, myths and traditions of neo-African religions in the New World such as Candomblé and Black Protestantism as they are portrayed in their creative writings from an individual point of view. Assuming that the contemporary literary production of Black women constitutes the main form of the cultural materiality to be read, it is crucial to inquire how both of them have been able to survive and resist by using the narrative form of storytelling, despite all the odds in their cultural and historical contexts. After all, by writing from their very personal experiences, Angelou and Mãe Beata tell stories based on what they have lived in order to pass their wisdom to the readers. Through the lenses of a cultural paradigm, culture is understood as a site of political and social discussion and struggle in terms of race. Such is the multidisciplinary nature of Cultural Studies and African Diaspora Studies that it is exactly their broad perspectives that demand critical investigation in different fields of knowledge if they are intended to go beyond the formality of literature. Therefore, in this paper, literature, translation and cultural issues do not exclude each other, because they become fundamental tools to enrich the critical readings.

Bionote: FELIPE FANUEL XAVIER RODRIGUES (UERJ/Fulbright/CAPES) is a PhD student in Comparative Literature at the State University of Rio de Janeiro. He has a Master's degree in Religious Studies from the Methodist University of São Paulo. He received his B.A. in Letters from the State University of Rio de Janeiro and his B.A. in Theology from the Methodist University of São Paulo. He has been awarded a Fulbright/CAPES grant for visiting student researcher study in Literature at the Dartmouth College, in the United States, for 2014-2015.

PAPER 9:

Title: The instant of the poetic glimpse – Black women's voices and representations of childhood in the African Diaspora

Speaker: Susana Fuentes (UERJ/FAPERJ/CAPES)

Abstract: Affirming distinct contexts of age, class, gender, territories and cultures, the purpose of the present study is to perceive the aesthetic glimpse translating memories and reinventing childhood, as well as reshaping cities, landscapes, streets. Through the lenses of transnational spaces, the focus will be on Afro-descendant contemporary women writers living in cities as different as Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, and Berlin. Each author reinvents her own places in fiction where she creates a new home. New sights inform the imagined territories and the polyphonic qualities within an imagined unity, elaborating new subjectivities. Preserving something by means of resistance - 'resilience', their strategies are seen here as translation of the ancient, transferring, transforming, in order to re-open the gap, to arrange the fissures and inhabit the earth. To take back and forth, to bring forth within the language – transforming it – and hence making way to something new. As Paul Gilroy announces, a movement "that struggles to repeat the unrepeatable, to present the unpresentable" (GILROY). Women, memories, childhood, renewed qualities of desire displacing the imagined borders; nurturing reinventions of the self in that Black Atlantic. As in Molara Ogundipe-Leslie's raising voice: "We must discover 'diaspora literacy' and, through it, strengthen our similarities through our differences and our inalienable historical common origins and experiences" (DAVIES, C.B and OGUNDIPE-LESLIE). Memories take place by reinventing the self, and in this movement of dealing with silences, gaps, loss, finding a place to come back to – the experience of return. How to inhabit the text, to recover the body within the context of contemporaneity, and the issues of a globalized world? Afro descendant women have been elaborating their homes in the context of exile. How do they create this space to say: here and there? Which are the strategies? Which characters are portrayed as able to translate this movement? Different works will be analyzed, from short-story to essay and poetry, written in English, Portuguese, Spanish and German. Transcultural representations contributing to depict memories, and to delineate a history of memories built by women in the African Diaspora, blurring the borders, producing spaces in-between (BHABHA). This is the recurrent tension we may grasp – bringing different outcomes: "standing for the return and rediscussing its shape – tradition; or standing for the creation and acknowledgment of something new – translation" (SALGUEIRO, on HALL). The intercultural activity, the plurality of paths in the texts installs the source of one's power in creative speech. As Carole Boyce Davies points out, "women come to voice in writing or speaking - or break through silence by: [...] locating oneself in society and speaking from there." Here we depict the 'diaspora literacy' as a place on the world stage, as resilience, as a resistance and a 'getting over'. Spirits and bodies find their word and redefine the world; nurturing the gap, founding or simply reorganizing spaces to dwell on earth. The investigation includes reading of GATES, SAID, SPIVAK, DERRIDA, and also works on intercultural translation by GENTZLER and VENUTI, among others.

Bionote: SUSANA FUENTES (UERJ/FAPERJ/CAPES) is currently Postdoctoral researcher and holder of the Capes/FAPERJ Fellowship at the State University of Rio de Janeiro. She holds an MA in Brazilian Literature and a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the same University. Her debut novel "Luzia" (7Letras, 2011), developed as part of her Ph.D. dissertation, was a finalist for the 'São Paulo Prize for Literature' (2012). As part of her Research Activities as a postdoctoral fellow, she has presented lectures on Afro-Brazilian women's voices and has contributed to courses in African-American and Afro Brazilian Literatures led by her supervisor in Masters and PhD courses.

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Post-Editing Productivity and Raw Machine Translation Output Quality: Temporal and cognitive effort in discussion
Heloísa Delgado, Débora Pasin and Asafe Cortina
Pontifical Catholic University of Rio Grande do Sul

Organizations with large translation volumes and a broad range of target language requirements have increasingly implemented Machine Translation (MT) technology and, as a result, technical translators have progressively been asked to post-edit according to specific guidelines and quality criteria. In fact, organizations implementing MT are searching for models of productivity for post-editing which means that professional translators need to engage with this inevitable development so that productivity models are realistic. Although research and reports from industry demonstrate that it is feasible to increase productivity with the help of both MT and post-editing, there has been a concern regarding real expectations when it comes to the post-editor and (his) productivity. Studies have shown that post-editing may indeed be known to have a positive effect on productivity and in quality. The speed in which the extensive translated material is produced and its subsequent quality, taking post-editing productivity not only in terms of the ratio of quantity and quality to time, but also of the cognitive effort expended (effort here would be inversely related to productivity, i.e., the higher the effort, the lower the productivity) need to be largely discussed. Given that, the topics we would like to see addressed (but not limited to) in this panel are: i) correlations between automatic metrics and post-editing productivity measured by processing speed and cognitive measures of effort (through the use of eye tracking, TAP protocols, and the like); ii) analysis of the quality of post-editing versus productivity and iii) suggestions of metrics involving score thresholds and confidence estimation.

For informal enquiries: [heloisaDOTdelgadoATpucrsDOTbr]

Heloísa Koch Delgado (PUCRS) is an English Language educator and translator and holds a PhD in Language Studies (UFRGS). Her main fields of research are Terminology, Translation and English Language Teaching. Research member in GELCORPSUL (Corpus Linguistics Study Group) and GPEOCS (Olympic Studies and Health Sciences Research Group), contributing mainly in the field of terminology and translation output quality. Coordinator of DicTrans (Pedagogical Trilingual Dictionary about the Bipolar Disorder), partially supported by CNPq. Her present research focuses on the post-editing productivity of specialized languages, taking into consideration factors such as temporal and cognitive efforts.

 

Débora Montenegro Pasin (SD Language Office) is a specialist in Translation Studies (PUCRS) and has international experience (seven years/ USA & Italy) and extensive knowledge in the field of Linguistics and Terminology with emphasis on teaching and teacher training. She is a researcher and translator of technical and scientific texts in the following languages: Portuguese, English, Italian, Spanish and French. Member of the DicTrans project, being her main contributions the research of translation of specialized languages and the study of cognitive efforts on post-editing in both English and Italian languages.

 

 

Asafe Cortina is majoring in Computer Science and in English Teaching. He has been an English and Spanish translator and interpreter both in Brazil and in the United States. He has organized and worked as a translator and interpreter in events, mainly the ones related to Medicine and Computer Science. He is a member of the DicTrans Project and his focal point is the analysis of automatic metrics involving score thresholds and issues related to human and machine translation interfaces.

 

 

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SESSION PLAN

Introduction session – 15 minutes

PAPER TITLES, ABSTRACTS AND BIONOTES

PAPER 1 (20 minutes for presentation + 10 minutes for discussion)

Title: Automatic evaluation of machine translation: correlating post-editing effort and Translation Edit Rate (TER) scores

Speakers: Mercedes García-Martínez, Center for Research and Innovation in Translation and Translation Technology (CBS), Arlene Koglin, Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG), Bartolomé Mesa-Lao, CBS & Michael Carl, CBS

Abstract:

The availability of systems capable of producing fairly accurate translations has increased the popularity of machine translation (MT). The translation industry is steadily incorporating MT in their workflows engaging the human translator to post-edit the raw MT output in order to comply with a set of quality criteria in as few edits as possible. The quality of MT systems is generally measured by automatic metrics, producing scores that should correlate with human evaluation.

In this study, we investigate correlations between one of such metrics, i.e. Translation Edit Rate (TER), and actual post-editing effort as it is shown in post-editing process data collected under experimental conditions. Using the CasMaCat workbench as a post-editing tool, process data were collected using keystrokes and eye-tracking data from five professional translators under two different conditions: i) traditional post-editing and ii) interactive post-editing. In the second condition, as the user types, the MT system suggests alternative target translations which the post-editor can interactively accept or overwrite, whereas in the first condition no aids are provided to the user while editing the raw MT output. Each one of the five participants was asked to post-edit 12 different texts using the interactivity provided by the system and 12 additional texts without interactivity (i.e. traditional post-editing) over a period of 6 weeks.

Process research in post-editing is often grounded on three different but related categories of post-editing effort, namely i) temporal (time), ii) cognitive (mental processes) and iii) technical (keyboard activity). For the purposes of this research, TER scores were correlated with two different indicators of post-editing effort as computed in the CRITT Translation Process Database (TPR-DB) *. On the one hand, post-editing temporal effort was measured using FDur values (duration of segment production time excluding keystroke pauses >_ 200 seconds) and KDur values (duration of coherent keyboard activity excluding keystroke pauses >_ 5 seconds). On the other hand, post-editing technical effort was measured using Mdel values (number of manually generated deletions) and Mins values (number of manually generated insertions).

Results show that TER scores have a positive correlation with actual post-editing effort as reflected in the form of manual insertions and deletions (Mins/Mdel) as well as time to perform the task (KDur/FDur).

* CRITT Translation Process Database: http://bridge.cbs.dk/platform/?q=CRITT_TPR-db

Bionote: Mercedes García-Martínez is a computer science engineer and a research assistant at the Center for Research and Innovation in Translation and Translation Technology, CBS (Denmark). Arlene Koglin is a PhD candidate in Translation Studies at the Federal University of Minas Gerais (Brazil). Bartolomé Mesa-Lao is a freelance translator and a research assistant at the Center for Research and Innovation in Translation and Translation Technology, CBS (Denmark). Michael Carl is an associate professor at the Department of International Business Communication, CBS (Denmark).

PAPER 2 (20 minutes for presentation + 10 minutes for discussion)

Title: Cognitive effort in discussion: insights from Portuguese-Chinese translation and post-editing task logs

Speakers: Márcia Schmaltz, Ana Luísa Varani Leal, Lidiao S. Chao & Derek F. Wong, University of Macau (UM), Igor Antonio Lourenço da Silva, Federal University of Uberlândia (UFU), Adriana Pagano & Fábio Alves, Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG), & Paulo Quaresma, University of Evora (UE).

Abstract:

This paper reports on an ongoing empirical-experimental project (AuTema-PostEd) which aims at tapping into translation and post-editing processes as a source of insight into the role of translators' understanding in task problem solving. It analyses data gathered from translation and post-editing task logs by subjects working with the language pair Portuguese-Chinese in both directions (L1 into L2 and L2 into L1), Chinese being the subjects' L1 and Portuguese their L2. Sixteen professional translators performed two translation tasks (L1 into L2 and L2 into L1) and two post-editing tasks (one in their L1 and another one in their L2) using machine-translated input provided by the software PCT (Portuguese-Chinese Translator). Eye movements and keyboard and mouse activities were logged using the software Translog-II connected a Tobii T120 Eye Tracker in order to capture translators' behaviour (user-activity data, UAD) while translating and post-editing. Retrospective protocols were recorded immediately after each task. Source texts were short news reports (80-word or character-equivalent long) selected on the basis of distinctive cohesive chains running throughout them. The assumption was that identity chains whereby discourse participants are introduced and tracked throughout the text would require the translators to retrieve the identity of what is being talked about by referring to another expression either in the co-text or the context of situation and culture; retrieval movements were thus expected to be captured by eye movements and keyboard activity during reading and writing. Machine-translated inputs were expected to have an impact on source text understanding, especially in instances of ambiguity, predetermining, whether correctly or wrongly, the final target text rendition. Task logs were analysed to investigate text production of selected cohesive chains. To achieve that end, UAD from eye tracking recordings (look backs, look forwards, fixation count and duration) and keyboard logging (text production between pauses, and recursiveness) were collected using the methodology proposed. A linear mixed-effects regression model (LMER) was applied to the data set, and retrospective protocols were analysed for subjects' verbalization of problem-solving decisions regarding the cohesive chains under study. Quantitative results showed that, regardless of task type (i.e., translating from scratch or post-editing), the cohesive chain type had an impact on producing the target text, but not on understanding the source text, while retrospective protocols suggested impact on both. The results highlight the relevance of a fine-grained analysis of all data sources (i.e., eye tracking, key logging, and retrospective protocols) along with an analysis of the quality of the final renditions. Translation process research has borrowed a number of measures of research in other domains, such as reading and writing researches, and only combined analyses may be able to show what measures are really applicable to studies focusing on translation and post-editing.

Bionotes: Márcia Schmaltz, Ana Luísa Varani Leal, Lidiao S. Chao & Derek F. Wong are researchers from the University of Macau (UM) Graduate Program in Translation Studies and the Natural Language Processing & Portuguese-Chinese Machine Translation Laboratory (NLP2CT). Igor Antonio Lourenço da Silva is a researcher at the Federal University of Uberlândia (UFU). Adriana Pagano & Fábio Alves are researchers at the Laboratory for Experimentation in Translation (LETRA) at the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG). Paulo Quaresma is a researcher at the Department of Computer Science at the University of Evora (UE).

PAPER 3 (20 minutes for presentation + 10 minutes for discussion)

Title: Monolingual post-editing: an investigation of temporal, technical and cognitive effort during task execution

Speaker: Norma Fonseca, Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG)

Abstract:

This study investigates temporal and technical effort by comparing monolingual post-editing data with bilingual post-editing and human translation data in the language pairs English-Portuguese and French-Portuguese. Furthermore, it also investigates whether cognitive effort is associated with metacognition during monolingual post-editing processes in the same language pairs. In order to do that, we have carried out an exploratory study with six subjects in each language pair. Data was collected using key logging, screen recordings, and guided written protocols. The analysis focused on task execution time, on the number of mouse and keyboard movements in the three different tasks, on the pauses lasting more than 5 seconds and evidences of metacognition in guided written protocols in the monolingual post-editing task. Preliminary results indicate that temporal effort is greater in bilingual post-editing in the English-Portuguese language pair, and that technical effort is greater in monolingual post-editing in the same language pair. They also point to evidences of metacognition in the protocols, specifically metacognitive knowledge of person variables, in which subjects show they are aware of the cognitive effort, knowledge of task variables, by recognizing, for example, the nature of the task they perform, and knowledge of strategy variables, by knowing how to deal with problems and when adapting strategies to solve them. In line with advances in experimental research in Translation Studies, this study suggests the need for using eye tracking to collect more accurate data regarding cognitive effort in the definitive data collection that will start to be carried in August 2014. It also shows the usefulness of investigating more source languages, that is, English, Spanish and Chinese, which have different degrees of similarity with the target language, i.e., Portuguese, to see how source and target language proximity can influence temporal, technical and cognitive effort. Furthermore, the establishment of more criteria for selecting experimental texts proved to be essential in order to ensure the same degree of textual complexity of those experimental texts in just one kind of task: monolingual post-editing.

Bionote: Norma Fonseca is currently a PhD candidate in Applied Linguistics at the Graduate Program in Linguistics and Applied Linguistics (POSLIN) at Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG) in Brazil, where she develops empirical-experimental research in Translation Studies. She got a Master degree in Applied Linguistics from the same Program. Her bachelor degree in English and Portuguese was received from Federal University of Viçosa (UFV).

PAPER 4 (20 minutes for presentation + 10 minutes for discussion)

Title: Correlation and assessment of Omega-T translation output, post-edition and human translated product: linguistic quality in focus

Speakers: Larissa Ramos, Roundtable Studio & Vanessa Fischer, TraduServices

Abstract:

Published research on the topic of post-editing is plentiful but translation professionals still might predict that the product of machine translation (MT) combined with post-editing is inferior in quality to the human translated product. Fiederer and O'Brien conducted a study, which evaluated the quality of the sentences produced by MT and subsequently post-edited, and sentences translated by humans. They concluded that MT plus post-editing could be equal to or even higher than human translation quality, but highlighted that more search is needed especially in terms of linguistic quality and end users' acceptance. Other studies have shown some positive points of this method, both in productivity and in quality. Taking quality aspects into consideration, this presentation aims to correlate and assess, especially regarding linguistic quality issues, the potential of machine translation (MT) output, post-edition and human translation of scientific articles through the use of risk criteria methodology. Our corpus consists of 200-source text sentences (around 5.000 tokens), extracted from an article in the Bipolar Disorder Journal (2010), which were compared and analyzed between the outputs of the Omega-T software, of a professional translator and a post-editor. Our assessment methodology was based on an adaptation of Pym's model of risk criteria analysis, in which "translations problems can be described as high-risk, low-risk or anything in between". Pym's adapted model helped us to assess the outputs in a more objective way, although clarity and style aspects of the translated texts were also verified, especially concerning their proximity to the discourse inherent to the scientific community of psychiatric disorders. The risks were categorized as follows: a) Word non-equivalence: low risk, b) Word category: low risk, c) Term non-equivalence: medium risk, d) Word order: medium risk, and e) Term non-equivalence and word order: high risk. Results so far have shown that the recurrent post-edited linguistic feature (50%) is noun/adjective/verb collocations, which falls into the high-risk category (syntactic and pragmatic aspects are affected) and not seen in human professional translation. Recordings on AntConc have been made to keep a record of the post-editions and help with the recognition of other problems encountered in this phase such as cognitive efforts caused by the amount of language inadequacies presented by the machine. Although these results partially show that the linguistic quality might well be an issue in post-editing, they are far from conclusive. Results that are more concrete, based on a larger corpus, will be reached at the beginning of 2015.

Bionotes: Larissa Ramos is a Bachelor of Letters (Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, UFRGS) and works as a translator at RoundTable Studio. She is a research member of the DicTrans Project. Vanessa Fischer has a major in Letters from PUCRS. She works as a translator at TraduServices and is a research member of the DicTrans Project.

PAPER 5 (20 minutes for presentation + 10 minutes for discussion)

Title: Direct translation of Architecture terms provided by Omega-T: post-editing cognitive effort in discussion

Speakers: Asafe Cortina, PUCRS & Dirceu de Oliveira Garcia Filho, Núcleo Arquitetura

Abstract:

The academic field of Architecture in Brazil is not as strong as in the United States and other European countries, but it has been increasing in the last few years, bringing about an burgeoning number of Brazilian academic architects who need to present papers and projects and submit articles abroad. Even though Architecture is an area in which English is frequently used, professionals of the field usually lack English writing and speaking skills, demanding fully technical research from translators and interpreters who, thus, narrow the gap between offer (low English proficiency level) and demand (the need to publicize research overseas). Architecture, like other fields, contains specialized terminology and a substantial amount of terms is commonly used on a daily basis. The terms in Brazilian Portuguese "pé-direito," "plana tipo," and "cortes", for example, are often translated as "right foot," "plant type," and "cuts" respectively, by machine translations in general; however, their English equivalents are "high ceiling," "standard plan," and "sections. This study, of a qualitative nature, aims at describing and analyzing the cognitive effort of post-edition in terms of productivity and quality, concerning specifically the issue of direct translation frequently offered by the MT (in our study, the Omega-T). We selected five articles on Architecture in English (3.000 tokens), which were inserted in the software AntConc to generate the frequency list of candidates to terms. As an example, in one text with 675 tokens, 34 were candidates to terms, which were repeated throughout the text at least twice each, and around 2/3 of them – not considering the repetitions – presented a direct translation by the MT and, consequently, lexical and pragmatic inadequacies. Although this research is still incipient and only provides initial results, we tend to believe that MT quality, regarding the appropriate equivalences of polysemic words, is low, which consumes time and demands high cognitive effort from the post-editor. Far from conclusive, this research will present statistical data analysis - larger corpus and specific methodology based on Controlled Language (CL) rules – at the beginning of 2015. We will also describe and analyze the amount of cognitive effort spent while post-editing lexical inadequacies before and after applying the CL rules. The think-aloud method will be used to evaluate the translation process and the target text revision. A professional architect will help revise the MT output to verify the adequacy of the terms translated to keep them close to the discourse inherent to the technical community of the Architecture field.

Bionote: Asafe Cortina is majoring in English Language Teaching at PUCRS. He has been an English and Spanish translator/interpreter for 5 years, both in Brazil and in the United States. He has organized international events, mainly the ones related to Medicine and Computer Science. He is a member of the DicTrans Project. Dirceu Garcia Filho is an architect and urbanist, graduated from PUCRS. He currently works with the development of 3D projects at "Núcleo Arquitetura." He studied graphic design and worked with book editing and diagramming.

PAPER 6 (20 minutes for presentation + 10 minutes for discussion)

Title: Post-editing of machine translation output: an analysis of productivity and quality regarding the cognitive effort in decision-making processes

Speaker: Débora Montenegro Pasin, SD Language Office

Abstract:

The following paper aims to analyze productivity and quality issues regarding the cognitive effort in decision-making processes when it comes to post-editing machine translation (henceforth, MT) output, in order to reach language accuracy and text adequacy in an optimized way. For the purposes of this paper, and yet, to enhance and disseminate the representativeness of Locke's work worldwide, an excerpt of the article about "Some Thoughts Concerning Education", a 1693 treatise on the education of gentlemen written by the English philosopher John Locke, was extracted from the online encyclopedia Wikipedia.com and translated from English to Brazilian Portuguese with the use of a translation free software; once the MT was accomplished, post-edition was started. It is relevant to mention that this paper is qualitatively based on the premises of risk criteria and productively based on the observations of post-editing metric correlations on productivity. According to a model of risk criteria, translation matters are related to their risk levels – low-risk, medium-risk or high-risk – and those are associated to the text suitability, which not only comprises grammar features, but also - and more importantly - text meaning and intention. Recent researches and reports from industry indicate that it is possible to increase productivity by using MT and post-editing; however, it is not yet clear what productivity can be realistically expected from a post-editor: the one concerning the ratio of quantity and quality to time, the one related to the cognitive effort expended, or both. Partial results have shown that the higher the effort the lower the productivity, on the other hand, high quality in socio-discursive pertinency is expected. The excerpt chosen consisted of 1.193 tokens and the following percentages were reached so far: (a) Requires complete translation: 20% (high risk); (b) Little post-editing needed: 40% (medium risk); (c) Fit for purpose: 40% (low risk). Although these results enhance the need of post-edition when it comes to language accuracy and text adequacy – text quality per se – time-related productivity results are far from conclusive. Further studies are to be concluded until the end of 2014.

Bionote: Débora Montenegro Pasin is a specialist in Translation Studies (Pontifical Catholic University of Rio Grande do Sul) and has international experience (almost 10 years/ USA & Italy) and extensive knowledge in the field of Linguistics and Terminology with emphasis on teaching and teacher training. She is a researcher and translator of technical and scientific texts in the following languages: Portuguese, English, Italian, Spanish and French. Member of the DicTrans project, being her main contributions the research of translation of specialized languages and the study of cognitive efforts on post-editing in both English and Italian languages.

WRAP-UP TIME SECTION

20 minutes

This panel:

Six presentations x 30 = 180 minutes

Fifteen minutes for the introduction section

Twenty minutes for the wrap-up section

Total: 215 minutes

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Innovative approaches to the assessment of student learning on translator education programmes
Dorothy Kelly, University of Granada, Spain

Assessment is an essential part of any teaching and learning process, and translator training is no exception to this. Yet, despite substantial advance in translator education methods, Hatim & Mason's position of 17 years ago regarding assessment, still holds: "The assessment of translator performance is an activity which, despite being widespread, is under-researched and under-discussed" (Hatim y Mason 1997: 197). In particular, the assessment of student learning on translator education programmes continues to be under-researched, and is often confused with translation quality assessment. According to an extensive survey of translator trainers carried out in Spain in 2010 (Kelly, 2010), assessment is the single major area of their activity which provokes most concern and insecurity amongst trainers on university programmes, and the area where they would most appreciate support in the form of innovative proposals and trainer training.

Of the three basic functions of assessment: diagnostic, formative and summative, most emphasis has traditionally been placed on the summative function, that of awarding marks, professional accreditation/certification, or even professional posts. On programmes across the world and indeed in professional examinations, summative assessment continues to be based almost exclusively on traditional translation exercises, in varying examination conditions, corrected by a single teacher/examiner, often using marking scales which deduct points for each 'error' identified, starting from a maximum score representing a notional optimal performance.

Much less attention has been paid to diagnostic assessment or needs analysis, and to formative assessment. Yet the former is essential for effective planning of any course module, and indeed for full programme design at all levels. And the latter, giving constant and detailed feedback to students on their progress throughout the learning process, is central to any student-centred educational process.

In response to demand from trainers for innovation in this aspect of their activity, the panel will contemplate aspects of all three basic functions of assessment, focusing on diagnostic, formative and summative assessment of student knowledge and learning on training programmes as distinct from translation quality assessment (excluded from the scope of the panel). It will present research carried out into innovative approaches to assessment on training programmes and accreditation. Issues to be addressed include: the alignment of assessment with competences and intended learning outcomes; the alignment of assessment with classroom methods and activities; principles of student-centred assessment; variety of assessment instruments and activities; team, peer and self assessment; internal versus external assessment; the use of learning portfolios, alone or in combination with other assessment instruments; the assessment of 'generic' competences such as interpersonal or intercultural competence; the formulation of assessment criteria (rubrics); grading practices in general; norm and criterion-referenced grading; accreditation systems and their impact on assessment in training programmes; the impact of innovative approaches on student learning and student experience.

For informal enquiries: [dkellyATugrDOTes]

Dorothy Kelly is professor of Translation at the University of Granada, where she is also Vice Rector for International Relations. She obtained her B.A. in Translating and Interpreting at Heriot-Watt University, and her doctoral degree from the University of Granada. Her main research interests are translator training, directionality in translation and intercultural competence. She is editor of the Interpreter and Translator Trainer. She was a member of the EMT Expert Group, a member of Spain's national Bologna Experts Team until 2013, and is currently the Chair of the Executive Board of the Coimbra Group of Universities.

 

 

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SESSION PLAN

Discussion time at the end of each session

SESSION 1:

Introduction by convenor

PAPER 1: Assessment instruments in translator training

Anabel Galán & Amparo Hurtado, Universitat Autónoma de Barcelona

PAPER 2: Assessing products and processes: developing process-oriented criteria to measure translation performance

Gary Massey, Peter Jud and Maureen Ehrensberger-Dow

PAPER 3: A manageable combined assessment approach: competence and decision-making

Catherine Louise Way

Paper 4: Assessment in competence-based, technology-enhanced, collaborative translation classes

Viviana Gaballo

Paper 5: An empirical study on summative assessment instruments and tasks in translation teaching.

Stefano Pavani and Amparo Hurtado Albir

SESSION 2:

Paper 6: Using rubrics to scaffold learning. How the integration of criterion-referenced descriptors enhances student-centred formative assessment

Bryan J. Robinson, M. Dolores Olvera-Lobo and Manuel Escabias-Machuca

Paper 7: Implications of ATA Examination Data for Student Assessment

Geoffrey Koby

PAPER 8: TROUBLESHOOTING NOTE-TAKING ISSUES IN CONSECUTIVE INTERPRETING: METHODS AND TOOLS FOR (SELF)DIAGNOSIS

Karl McLaughlin

Wrap-up by convenor

PAPER TITLES, ABSTRACTS AND BIONOTES

PAPER 1: Assessment instruments in translator training

Anabel Galán & Amparo Hurtado, Universitat Autónoma de Barcelona

In this paper we focus on assessment instruments in translation teaching, and we propose various assessment instruments taking competence-based training as a starting point. Translation teaching's foremost assessment instrument has traditionally been a text's translation. The translation of a text only accounts for a specific action carried out by the student. It does not provide information on the process they have followed, their ability to identify and resolve problems (the internal and external strategies they have used), their assimilation of implicit theories, their ability to regulate their own learning process, etc. Therefore, it is insufficient for the purpose of obtaining information on a student's level of competence, and other instruments are needed. Assessment proposals specifically for translation teaching which focus on more than just the correction of translations remain scarce. Some exemples are: Hurtado Albir (1999) who puts forward various assessment instruments for diagnostic, formative and summative assessment with the translation-task-and-project-based approach as her framework; Presas (2012) suggests criteria and instruments for appraising annotated translation assessment tasks; Kelly (2005), Hurtado Albir (2007, 2008, 2014) and Galán-Mañas (2009, 2010) advocate the use of portfolios as an alternative method and put forward a possible organisational structure for them. In a competence-based approach, assessment instruments should serve to collect information about the acquired competences, to assess the end product and the process, to promote student self-assessment, and to obtain a maximum amount of information on a student's competence. Furthermore, a criteria-based form of assessment should be developed, using indicators, assessment criteria and performance levels in every case. In this paper we will analyse the current situation of assessment in Translation Studies and we will propose examples of various instruments that can be used for diagnostic, formative and summative assessment in translator training:

- Texts to translate with prototypical problems according to the level of competence.

- Reports of different kinds. For instance, in the translation report the student can identify problematic fragments encountered when translating a text, explain the process followed, specify the sources consulted, etc.

- Questionnaires for diagnostic purposes (Orozco and Hurtado Albir 2002), self-assessment questionnaires, and questionnaires to collect information on translation problems or translation knowledge, etc.

- Reflective diaries with students' on their reflections on their learning process.

- Translation process recordings to analyse the process: pauses, corrections, type of searches, etc.

- Students portfolio with questionnaires, gist translations, comparative translation analyses, reports, translations, etc. carried out and selected by the student to illustrate their progress.

Finally, different types of rubrics for various assessment tasks (translations, reports, students' portfolio, self-assessment, etc.) will be presented.

Bionote: Anabel Galán-Mañas has a PhD in Translation, Interpreting and Intercultural Studies. She teaches translation at Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB). Her research interests are translator training - especially in blended learning environments - and the use of information and communication technologies. She is a member of the PACTE group. Amparo Hurtado Albir is Full Professor in Translation Studies at Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. She is team leader of a number of research projects on translation pedagogy and the acquisition of translation competence, head of the PACTE research group, and author of numerous publications on the theory and pedagogy of translation.

PAPER 2: Assessing products and processes: developing process-oriented criteria to measure translation performance

Gary Massey, Peter Jud and Maureen Ehrensberger-Dow

Since Krings' (1986) groundbreaking exploration of translators' cognitive processes, translation researchers have been developing tools and techniques to investigate the processes behind translation products, and the effects of those processes on target-text quality. Process research methods have also found their way into translator education, serving to complement traditional product-oriented teaching by encouraging metacognition and self-regulation. Alongside more established techniques to access and evaluate translation processes, such as written commentaries and dialogue protocols, those currently proposed and successfully deployed in recent didactic and diagnostic experiments include screen recording combined with various forms of retrospection, self-evaluation, peer evaluation and trainer-student dialogue (e.g. Angelone 2013a, 2013b; Enríquez Raído 2013; Massey & Ehrensberger-Dow 2013). Over the past few years, all the compulsory entrance tests for our institute's MA in Professional Translation have been recorded on-screen, introducing a process-oriented component to the diagnostic assessment of, and the formative feedback on, the performance and potential shown by candidates. Building on studies of process-oriented teaching and testing methods already implemented at our institute (cf. Massey & Ehrensberger-Dow 2013), as well as on work indicating how certain process measures may correlate with translation quality and even predict subsequent performance (e.g. Massey & Ehrensberger-Dow 2014), we have been attempting to identify indicators and predictors of performance in the processes of candidates taking and retaking our MA entrance tests. After reporting on the design and results of these exploratory studies, this paper discusses the possible applications and implications of our findings in the diagnostic, formative and summative assessment of translation competence. The ultimate objective of our research is to extend and refine traditional product-oriented measures by generating readily applicable criteria with which to evaluate observable screen-recorded actions and behaviour. It is hoped that these will offer hard-pressed staff and institutions an efficient, feasible means of assessing translation performance based not only on target-text products, but also on the processes that went into their making.

Bionote: Gary Massey is deputy head of the Institute of Translation and Interpreting at Zurich University of Applied Sciences (ZHAW) and director of its MA in Applied Linguistics. His research interests include translation processes and translation pedagogy. Peter Jud has an MA in Translation and is a lecturer at the ZHAW Institute of Translation and Interpreting. He researches translation processes and translation pedagogy. Maureen Ehrensberger-Dow is Professor of Translation Studies, teaching on the BA and MA programmes at the same Institute, and principal investigator of three nationally funded research projects, including one on translation workplace processes.

PAPER 3

A manageable combined assessment approach: competence and decision-making

Catherine Louise Way

Training in competences is not new to Translation Studies trainers who have, for some time now, used different models of translator competence (Krings, 1986; Ammann, 1990; Hurtado, 1995, 2007; Gile, 1995; Neubert, 1994, 2000; PACTE, 1998; Kelly 1999, 2002, 2005) to develop objectives and learning outcomes for their translation programmes. Competence based training (CBT) is also used increasingly in translation courses, however, assessment of such training has received little attention. Whilst training in certain competences with specific activities or exercises is common in early training stages, it is in the later stages of training, nevertheless, when all the competences intertwine to intervene in the creation of the final product. This is when assessment becomes a much more complex question. If students are to be assessed not only on the quality of their final product, but also on how their translator competence develops, assessment requires an individualised approach. We have tried and tested the use of Project Management with authentic translation briefs in the final stages of undergraduate courses in order to draw the trainees' attention to their different competences and the translation process, without neglecting the final product. This provides a clear working framework that emulates professional practice. Furthermore this team work approach is combined with the use of the Achille's Heel sheet (Way, 2008), thereby allowing students to see where their strengths and weaknesses lie in their own translator competence and pinpointing areas to be improved, whilst allowing discussion of the strategies to do so. When faced with the task of assessing trainees' competences and their development during a translation course, many lecturers consider individualised assessment of the process a complex and time consuming alternative. In the methodology that we propose, assessment is both individual and collective and performed as the trainees explain and discuss the process they have pursued to reach the final translation product. Despite fears that this may be labour intensive, we will discuss how to perform these tasks in an efficient, manageable way. In this paper we propose to present examples of practical ways to introduce both project management and the assessment of trainees' competence in translation courses which are based on a structured framework of decision-making (Way 2014) by using practical examples of tried and tested methodologies, that have proven to be successful in large student groups over recent years in our translation programme. This approach has not only increased student participation and motivation, but has also improved trainees' final results.

Bionote: Catherine Way is a Senior Lecturer in Translation at the University of Granada and member of the AVANTI research group. She has authored/co-edited books and papers and is a member of the Editorial Board of ITT (previously Editor and co-editor) and Puentes. She is a member of the International Advisory Board of journals including Fachsprache, IJLLD, the book series Aprende a traducer and has peer reviewed for Major Translating Minor and Continuum. She has recently co-edited the Proceedings of the last EST Conference for John Benjamins. Her main fields of research are Legal Translation and Translator Training.

PAPER 4

Assessment in competence-based, technology-enhanced, collaborative translation classes

Viviana Gaballo

This paper rests on the assumption that assessment should be consequential to the methodology used in the learning and teaching approach adopted, so as to prevent the "pedagogical schizophrenia" (a phenomenon which unfortunately seems to be still widespread and which can be defined as the inconsistent relation between the chosen pedagogical approach and the relevant assessment methodology), which brings many students to repeatedly fail their exams or to fail to achieve the expected outcome. Since the digital turn of the 21st century has affected many aspects of teaching and learning in general, programme design, course delivery and assessment shall have to be re-thought to host the digital world. Furthermore, as network technology rapidly expands, and internet-based teaching and learning increasingly replaces traditional classrooms, also Language Studies (LS) and Translation Studies (TS) programmes need to apply updated pedagogical approaches that can meet the emerging needs of the Net g learners of today. Based on previous research on translator education (Kiraly 2000; Pym 2009; Göpferich & Jääskeläinen 2009; Stewart, Orbán & Kornelius 2010) and on the systemic-functional model of translation competence developed by Gaballo (2009), this study aims at providing a coherent picture of how to apply innovative approaches to the assessment of student learning (Goodyear, Banks, Hodgson & McConnell, 2004) on competence-based, technology-enhanced, collaborative translation programmes.

Bionote: Viviana Gaballo is Assistant Professor in English language and translation at the University of Macerata, Italy. Her main interests include translation competence, ESP and networked learning. She has developed a systemic-functional model that can be used to both define and assess translation competence.

PAPER 5

An empirical study on summative assessment instruments and tasks in translation teaching.

Stefano Pavani and Amparo Hurtado Albir

The purpose of this paper is to present an ongoing research project on summative assessment in translation teaching between Spanish and Italian. The general hypothesis of this research is that the "traditional" summative assessment system (the translation of a text) that is often used in translator training centers is not a completely reliable instrument and does not gather enough data about students' translation competence.

This research is approached from two perspectives: a descriptive one and an empirical one. This dual perspective is reflected in the structure of our paper: in the first part, we will discuss the results of a survey administered to a number of translation professors in Italy and Spain (modeled on Martínez 1992, Waddington 2002 and Kelly 2010) about the type of tests used to assess their students, their use of correction scales, assessment rubrics (if it is the case), etc. In the second part, we will present a proposal of summative assessment for students of translation from Spanish into Italian, which will be empirically validated with a group of students of the B.A. in Linguistic Intercultural Mediation at the University of Bologna. In addition, preliminary results of the research will be presented.

For the elaboration of this proposal of summative assessment we designed a teaching unit about the translation of tourism texts and it was administered to a group of Italian students of Spanish into Italian general translation. The teaching unit was designed following the translation task-based approach (Hurtado 1996,1999,2014) and many types of instruments are used: texts (to analyze, compare, correct and translate), questionnaires, information sheets, contrastive tasks, translation process recording, etc. The unit presents a multidimensional assessment and has various formative and summative assessment tasks. In addition, after the completion of the teaching unit, students will prepare a portfolio and perform a "traditional" summative evaluation exam (the translation of a text).

Subsequently, the results and the information collected using the different assessment tasks and the portfolio will be compared with the traditional test (the translated text) by means of ad hoc questionnaires answered by expert translation teachers.

The paper will emphasize diversified assessment instruments and tasks, which are multidimensional, criterion-referenced and competence-based. Our proposal aims at gathering more information about the degree of acquisition of students' translation competence (including the different subcompetences) and about the translation process and the strategies used by students as it does not assess translation only as a product.

Our assessment proposal not only can be used to teach translation between Spanish and Italian, but also in other combinations of close languages as it has a theoretical and pedagogical apparatus that allows reproducibility.

Bionote: Stefano Pavani is a PhD student in a cotutelle doctoral program between Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB), Spain and Università di Bologna, Italy. He holds an MA in Translation Studies from the UAB and he is a professional ENG, SPA > ITA translator. AMPARO HURTADO ALBIR is Full Professor in Translation Studies at Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB), Spain. She is the team leader of a number of research projects on translation pedagogy and the acquisition of translation competence and head of the PACTE research group. She is the author of numerous publications on the theory and pedagogy of translation.

PAPER 6

Using rubrics to scaffold learning. How the integration of criterion-referenced descriptors enhances student-centred formative assessment

Bryan J. Robinson, M. Dolores Olvera-Lobo and Manuel Escabias-Machuca

Context: Criterion-referenced descriptors offer a transparent approach to translator training that promotes the development of higher-order cognitive skills (Bloom 1973) - in particular analysis and evaluation, which are crucial to professional translators - and develops the interpersonal competences essential to efficient teamwork and specified in European tertiary education since the initiation of the Bologna process (Pagani 2002) but often ignored by academics. Descriptors in the form of rubrics provide students with scaffolding (Kiraly 1999, 2000, 2003) that supports and directs their development through essentially social constructivist activities (Robinson et al 2008), undertaken both in- and out-of-class, when the criteria they embody are in harmony with curricular objectives and the activities themselves allow for structured incremental growth in learning (Vygotsky 1978). Objectives: Our hypotheses are that (1) rubrics provide learners with tools they can learn to use and apply with substantial certainty that the grades awarded will gradually coincide with the tutor-set "standard" grades; that (2) the application of rubrics in team- and individual self- and peer-assessment activities will enhance the quality of their learning processes by developing higher-order cognitive skills; and that (3) the use of self- and peer-assessment of collaborative teamwork competences can broaden the learning experience at the tertiary level bringing actual learning closer to the aims of the Bologna process by including transverse competences. Method: In the present communication, we describe the use of rubrics as formative tools that provide valuable feedback in the context of our approach to their use in the classroom (Olvera-Lobo et al 2007; Robinson et al 2006; Robinson et al In press [a]). We draw on extensive data in order to measure their success in providing feedback during translation quality self- and peer-assessment workshops. Participants: Our sample consists of three consecutive generations of final year students (2010-11 n1=73; 2011-12 n2=73; 2012-13 n3=92) using a single rubric for self- and peer-, team and individual assessment (Robinson 1998). Furthermore, we present initial results on the use of a pilot rubric developed for the individual self- and peer-assessment of collaborative processes in team-based activities (Robinson In press [b]) with data drawn from the 2012-13 cohort (n3=92). Statistical analysis: We use the Shapiro-Wilks test to assess the normality of the grades awarded by individuals, teams and the tutor, ANOVA (for normally distributed grades), and the Kruskal-Wallis test and Friedman test (for non-normal distributions) to compare the average grade assigned by the different sources of variability (individual and team [self- and peer- awarded] and tutor) and detect possible differences between them. Finally, we use Cohen's kappa coefficient and the intraclass correlation coefficient, to compare interrater agreement in grades assigned by participants self, team and tutor. All statistical analysis is with R software. Conclusions: We believe our results will confirm the reliability of this approach and encourage the wider application of rubrics and the consequent collection of data from other contexts that will shed further light on their value in translator training.

Bionote: Bryan J. Robinson teaches translation at the University of Granada, is a translator for the bilingual Revista Española de Cardiología (Elsevier), and Examiner with the International Baccalaureate; M. Dolores Olvera-Lobo teaches Documentation and coordinator of the Scientific Information: Access and Evaluation research group (HUM-466); Manuel Escabias-Machuca is a teacher and researcher in the Department of Statistics and Operative Research.

PAPER 7

Implications of ATA Examination Data for Student Assessment

Geoffrey Koby

To assess student learning, one must first understand the kinds of problems that can arise in professional translation. Marking examinations for summative assessment differs from marking for formative assessment, yet important insights can be obtained from summative data. This paper examines the categories and numerical breakdown of error markings from one year of American Translators Association (ATA) certification examinations. The error types recorded fall into two large categories, transfer errors and errors of language mechanics. This paper analyzes a variety of aspects of error marking, including frequencies of error types in each language pair and across all language pairs, proportion of transfer errors vs. errors of language mechanics, distribution of error severities, categories never used, etc., as well as error types/frequencies broken down by score bands. This information can inform teachers' choice of marking categories and scales. Simply providing feedback to students using these categories and severities is useful in and of itself, but combining this feedback with qualitative/analytical comments adds additional dimensions to the feedback process. In addition, students can receive papers marked in this way for self-correction before teachers provide additional feedback.

For the present paper, numerical error data has been collected from 527 ATA certification examinations from 2006 in 23 language pairs (11 languages into English and 12 from English into other languages), and recorded on the ATA Framework for Standard Error Marking. For each examination, this data includes the language pair, passage score, passage type (A, B, C), pass/fail result, and individual errors by severity and category. This data is then aggregated to show patterns of error severities and categories for each passage within a language pair, and across passages, and across languages.

The ATA examinations are marked using the ATA error marking scale, in use since 2002 and designed for use in standardized testing conditions (see Koby/Champe 2013). Passages are corrected by two graders who assign a category (e.g., Omission, Usage) and error points to each error using a severity scale (1/2/4/8/16 points, based on the ATA "Flowchart for Error Point Decisions") focusing on each error's effect on text usefulness. ATA's pass threshold is 17 points (18 points fails), with no limit on the number of points that can be assigned.

Previously published research on this scale has shown methods to adapt it to classroom teaching (Doyle 2003, Koby/Baer 2005), and analysis of reading-level difficulty correlated to errors made (Howard 2009). This paper will expand this research by providing a large-scale analysis of the categories assigned in an actual testing program.

Bionote: Geoff Koby is associate professor of German/Translation at Kent State University. His research focuses on translation evaluation and assessment, particularly the ATA certification examination. Recent publications include "Welcome to the Real World: Professional-Level Translator Certification" (2013, w/G. Champe), "Certification and Job Task Analysis (JTA): Establishing Validity of Translator Certification Examinations" (2013, w/A. Melby), and "The ATA Flowchart and Framework as a Differentiated Error-Marking Scale in Translation Teaching" (2014). He also recently translated Einstein's Opponents: The Public Controversy Surrounding the Theory of Relativity during the 1920s (Milena Wazeck, 2014). His teaching focuses on translation assessment and financial, legal, and business translation.

PAPER 8

TROUBLESHOOTING NOTE-TAKING ISSUES IN CONSECUTIVE INTERPRETING: METHODS AND TOOLS FOR (SELF)DIAGNOSIS

Karl McLaughlin

The initial stages of note-taking for consecutive interpreting can often constitute something of a double-edged sword both for students and trainers. The acquisition of this crucial new skill is attractive and exciting for students who – following several arduous weeks of memory development, speech structure work and presentation enhancement training – invariably pin their hopes on notes resolving the difficulties encountered in the accurate reproduction of speeches just heard. At the same time, however, this acquisition process can prove daunting and highly frustrating if it does not embed properly through an adequate pedagogical approach. In many cases, students who initially struggle to master the multiple demands of note-based consecutive tend to perceive that they simply "cannot do it", although without necessarily being able to identify the precise reasons for their unsatisfactory performance. This oral communication discusses various strategies for consolidating the new technique by helping students focus more clearly on the different components involved in note-taking, avoiding the hit and miss impression that can often set in. The strategies include second-listening note repetition and revision, the use of a video camera to analyse individual note-taking technique and, in particular, the use of a structured questionnaire for diagnosing more precisely where individual and collective problems arise. By breaking down the job into its various phases (listening, writing, pre-production and the actual reproduction of the speech in the target language) and investigating students' self-perception of their performance in each, the diagnosis helps pinpoint specific and improvable aspects on which to focus in subsequent exercises, while also helping mitigate what can often be an initial and excessive fixation with symbol learning as the basis of their note-taking approach. The practical diagnosis strategies offered are based on the author's extensive experience of teaching consecutive interpreting on postgraduate courses in Britain, Spain and other countries.

Bionote: Karl McLaughlin has been a professional conference interpreter and translator since 1988, and has combined professional practice of both disciplines with teaching at university level in Spain, Britain and other countries for over twenty years, including the universities of La Laguna, Bradford and Leeds. His main research interests lie in aptitude testing for interpreting, methods for training in consecutive interpreting and quality issues in interpreting.

WRAP-UP SECTION – by the convenor

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Corpus-based Translation Studies – innovations in the new digital age
Marion Winters, Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh, UK
Sofia Malamatidou, University of Birmingham, UK

Corpus-based Translation Studies (CTS) has developed into a major paradigm in Translation Studies, ever since they were first introduced to the field some twenty years ago. Corpora are now used as CAT tools, in machine translation and translation memories, as well as in translator training. The application of corpus methodologies has allowed a better understanding of the nature of translated texts and their relationship to non-translated productions, offering new insights into the translation process and translator behaviour and style and moving the discipline of Translation Studies forward. As a field of study, CTS is truly inter-disciplinary, closely informed by developments in a range of related fields, such as corpus linguistics and computational linguistics. Research in those fields has recently seen great progress, offering the potential of exploring new and more complex types of corpora, such as multimodal corpora, while at the same time developing new means for corpus interrogation, together with new tools and techniques of analysis. If CTS is to expand its methods and applications, new technological advancements need to be fully embraced and new tools need to be developed. This needs to be in collaboration with other disciplines, since Translation Studies scholars often do not have the expertise to adapt tools to their needs or develop new ones, while computational linguists are often unaware of the needs of Translation Studies scholars. Similarly, maintaining a constructive dialogue with corpus linguistics will inform practices and offer the necessary theoretical insights. This panel aims to bring together the linguistic and computational side of corpus methodologies. It will discuss innovations in corpus methodologies and in analysis and annotation tools, with particular reference to translation and the translation profession, and provide a framework for collaboration and technological development in CTS to open up further avenues of research in this field.

 For informal enquiries: [mDOTwintersAThwDOTacDOTuk]

Marion Winters is Senior Lecturer in Translation Studies/German at Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh, Scotland, where she teaches translation technology, theory and practice. She is founding editor of the IATIS journal New Voices in Translation Studies, member of the IATIS Publications Committee and a professional member of the German and Irish translators' associations (BDÜ, ITIA). She has published several articles on translator style and is currently involved in a project on autobiographical writings and translation. Her main research interests include autobiographies in translation, corpus-based translation studies, translational stylistics and more specifically translator style and characterization in translation.

Sofia Malamatidou is a Lecturer in Translation Studies at the Birmingham Centre for Translation. She has worked as a research assistant on the Translational English Corpus project at the University of Manchester, UK. Her main research interests are in the field of corpus-based translation studies and she is currently working on developing corpus triangulation techniques for the study of translated texts. She is also interested in developing multimodal corpora that would allow for a systematic interrogation of images. She has written a number of articles on corpus-based translation studies and is the IATIS Chair of the Social Media and Outreach.

 

 

See other thematic panels

SESSION PLAN

Discussion time at the end of each paper

 

SESSION 1: Innovations in Corpus Methodologies

 

Introduction (10 min) – Marion Winters

PAPER 1:

Title: Taking Translation Corpora Further: An Introduction to Combined Corpus-Based Methods

Speaker: Sofia Malamatidou, University of Birmingham

PAPER 2:

Title: Training translators to use corpora hands-on: challenges and reactions by a group of 13 students at a UK university

Speaker: Ana Frankenberg-Garcia, University of SurreyPAPER 3:

PAPER 3:

Title: New computational tools in Corpus-based Translation Studies

Speaker: Marion Winters, Heriot-Watt University

PAPER 4:

Title: An annotation system for sign language corpora

Speaker: Ella Wehrmeyer, North-West University, Vanderbijlpark, South Africa

PAPER 5: 

Title: Assisting comprehension in specialized fields using corpus data: Comparing the effectiveness of raw and annotated contexts

Speaker: Elizabeth Marshman and Marie-Claude L'Homme, University of Ottawa

Wrap up session (10 min) – Sofia Malamatidou

 

PAPER TITLES, ABSTRACTS AND BIONOTES

 

PAPER 1

Title: Taking Translation Corpora Further: An Introduction to Combined Corpus-Based Methods

speaker: Sofia Malamatidou, University of Birmingham

Abstract:

Corpus-based research has yielded important insights into translation; however, single types of corpora have been traditionally privileged, thus neglecting the advantages of combined corpus-based methods. This study aims to introduce a unique corpus methodology where corpora (diachronic, synchronic, comparable and parallel) can be used complementarily for the analysis of linguistic features of translated texts and their impact on non-translated texts. The language pair examined is English-Greek. The corpus analysed is a diachronic (1990-2010) corpus of Greek non-translated and translated popular science articles, along with their English source texts, consisting of approximately half a million word, and divided into three subcorpora. The first subcorpus consists of non-translated Greek texts published in 1990-1991. The second subcorpus consists of non-translated and translated Greek texts articles published in 2003-2004, as well as the source texts of the translations. The third subcorpus includes non-translated as well as translated texts and their source texts, all published in 2010-2011. The analysis of the corpus consists of three stages: (a) the diachronic analysis of a corpus of non-translated texts to examine whether there is any development in the language over time, (b) the synchronic analysis of the comparable corpus to examine whether this development is mirrored in translated texts; and (c) the synchronic analysis of the parallel corpus to trace the development back to the source texts. Results suggest that certain linguistic features, such as the frequency of passive voice reporting verbs, in Greek texts have changed under the influence of translation from English and are now closer to the patterns found in respective English texts. Through the systematic application of the methodology to data from the genre of popular science, the study demonstrates how the proposed methodology can be fruitfully employed to deepen our understanding not only of translated texts, but also of the texts influencing and being influenced by them.

Bionote:

Sofia Malamatidou is a Lecturer in Translation Studies at the Birmingham Centre for Translation. She has worked as a research assistant on the Translational English Corpus project at the University of Manchester. Her main research interests are in the field of corpus-based translation studies and she is currently working on developing corpus triangulation techniques for the study of translated texts. She is also interested in developing multimodal corpora that would allow for a systematic interrogation of images. She has written a number of articles on corpus-based translation studies and is the IATIS Chair of the Social Media and Outreach team.

PAPER 2:

Title: Training translators to use corpora hands-on: challenges and reactions by a group of 13 students at a UK university

Speaker: Ana Frankenberg-Garcia, University of Surrey

Abstract:

With the proliferation of online off-the-peg corpora over the past decade or so, the use of corpora is no longer restricted to a small community of researchers working on language description and natural language processing. Anyone with an internet connection is now able to access corpora to help them with everyday questions about language, including questions for which dictionaries, grammars and other language resources do not always have clear answers. Translators are among those who have much to gain from using corpora, as widely acknowledged in the literature (see, for example, Zanettin 1998, Maia 2002, Bowker and Pearson 2002, Zanettin et al 2003, and Beeby et al 2009). Yet in contrast to the pressure that exists to train translators in the use of computer-assisted translation tools, there seems to be little or no incentive to teach translators to use corpora. Moreover, most of the research at the crossroads of translation and corpora seems to focus on the use of corpora in Translation Studies, and there is not yet enough information about the use of corpora in actual translation training and practice.

This paper discusses some of the challenges of training translators to use corpora, and then describes how a group of 13 students studying for an MA in Translation at the University of Surrey reacted to a hands-on module on learning to use corpora in everyday translation. The analysis of the students' reactions draws on (1) their responses to an anonymous questionnaire and (2) a corpus of graded assignments, where the students were required to write a report on their use of corpora in translation (after having been asked from day one to keep a diary with examples of using corpora in their everyday translation practice). The corpus of student reports was submitted to both a quantitative and a qualitative analysis. The quantitative analysis focuses on verifying the extent to which the students made reference to terms such as concordance, lemma, collocation, part-of-speech tagging, normalized frequency and so on, and the extent to which the actual queries described in the reports involved the use of those concepts. The qualitative analysis details a selection of examples of how different students used corpora and also their views of the experience.

The students' opinions of corpora were generally very favourable, despite the steep learning curve entailed. The analysis also indicated that while some students remained underusers of corpora, others were quite capable of carrying out sophisticated queries that provided them with answers which they would not have been able to find in other more conventional tools and resources.

Bionote:

Ana Frankenberg-Garcia is Senior Lecturer in Translation Studies and Programme Director of the MA in Translation at the University of Surrey. She was responsible for creating COMPARA, a parallel corpus of English and Portuguese (www.linguateca.pt/COMPARA). Her work on the applied uses of corpora has been published in international, peer-reviewed publications, including International Journal of Lexicography, International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, Corpora and ReCALL. In 2011 she co-edited New Trends in Corpora and Language Learning (Bloomsbury). She has been working for Oxford University Press since 2011 as chief editor of a new corpus-based Portuguese-English dictionary to be published in 2015.

PAPER 3

Title: New computational tools in Corpus-based Translation Studies

Speaker: Marion Winters, Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh

Abstract:

The aim of the present paper is to establish the profile of style of an author and translator using corpus-based methodologies. It is based on literary German-English parallel corpora of specific authors (F. Scott Fitzgerald, Natascha Wodin) and specific translators (Hans-Christian Oeser, Renate Orth-Guttmann). While corpus-based investigations of translator style, features of translation etc. have mostly used well-established text-analysis softwares in corpus-based translation studies (CTS), such as Wordsmith Tools, ParaConc and other concordancers, I intend to explore a variety of other softwares and methods. I will explore which softwares used in corpus linguistics or computational linguistics could usefully be applied in CTS and which information on author/translator style could be extracted from a corpus, for example, through application of tools for semantic profiling, semantic mirroring and distributional semantics. Concluding remarks will reflect upon strengths and limitations of corpus-analysis tools for profiling the style of an author/translator and identify desirable features of these tools for a more efficient application in CTS. Thus this study is also a call for collaboration between corpus-based translation studies and computational linguistics in developing and optimizing suitable corpus-analysis tools for CTS.

Bionote:

Marion Winters is Senior Lecturer in Translation Studies/German at Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh, Scotland, where she teaches translation technology, theory and practice. She is founding editor of the IATIS journal New Voices in Translation Studies, member of the IATIS Publications Committee and a professional member of the German and Irish translators' associations (BDÜ, ITIA). She has published several articles on translator style and is currently involved in a project on autobiographical writings and translation. Her main research interests include autobiographies in translation, corpus-based translation studies, translational stylistics and more specifically translator style and characterization in translation.

PAPER 4

Title: An annotation system for sign language corpora

Speaker: Ella Wehrmeyer, North-West University, Vanderbijlpark, South Africa

Abstract:

The proposed paper presents a transcription and annotation system for sign language corpora which allows transcripts of interpretations to be analysed using readily-available text-based corpus packages such as WordSmith Tools and Antconc. The transcription system is based on context-free lemmatized glosses that distinguish between different aspects of the sign language lexicon such as established signs, the productive lexicon, finger-spelling and the number system. The annotation system built onto the transcription system is designed to overcome the many obstacles faced by researchers in recording features of face-to-face communication. It allows the concise description of four aspects of signed interpretation of interest to a researcher in Interpreting Studies. Firstly, phonological features of sign language, such as handshape, movement, direction, facial expression and head/body movements can be recorded. Secondly, production features such as clarity and accuracy of sign articulation, signing speed, lag time, background noises, hesitations and chunking segmentation can be included. Thirdly, it allows for the categorization and analysis of interpreting features such as additions, omissions, skewed substitutions or strategies, as well as interpreting errors and corrections. Fourthly, the system allows for further annotations in terms of language use, such as parts of speech, different features of the productive lexicon and sign language discourse features such as topic marking and referencing. The system was designed in order to investigate issues relating to incomprehension of news broadcasts interpreted into South African Sign Language (SASL). The theoretical basis of the research is built on signed language interpreting studies, signed language corpus studies and the descriptive translation framework of norm-driven shifts to identify interpreting strategies. It adapts existing annotation systems used by corpus-based researchers in sign language linguistics, but specifically redesigns annotation codes so that they can be used in readily available software packages, thereby allowing the researcher to analyse and compare multiple interpretations. Although primarily designed for sign language interpreting research, the annotations can also be used or adapted to meet the requirements of corpus-based/driven research into spoken language (i.e. oral) interpretation, especially in terms of annotating non-verbal features of interpretation as well as interpreting strategies.

Bionote:

Ella Wehrmeyer is a senior lecturer in Translation Studies at the School of Languages, North-West University, Vanderbijlpark, South Africa where she teaches translation theory, literary translation and interpreting studies. She holds a D. Litt. et Phil. from the University of South Africa, Pretoria. Her dissertation investigated sign language interpreting on television using questionnaires, focus groups, eye-tracking and corpus analysis. Her research interests include sign language interpreting, interpreting strategies, corpus-driven research, eye-tracking, children's literature, ideology in translation and the development of theoretical models of translation and interpreting.

PAPER 5:

Title: Assisting comprehension in specialized fields using corpus data: Comparing the effectiveness of raw and annotated contexts

Speaker: Elizabeth Marshman and Marie-Claude L'Homme, University of Ottawa

Abstract:

Student translators must acquire a number of new abilities: translation strategies, research techniques, and—especially when working in specialized fields—domain knowledge. This knowledge can be gained in several ways. Scholars have highlighted the potential of corpora for accessing domain and terminological knowledge. Some terminological resources have incorporated contexts extracted from corpora and annotated with key information to assist users in acquiring this knowledge. However, choosing and annotating contexts requires significant investment of time and effort from resource developers, which multiplies as the size of the resources increases. This raises questions: What is the return on this investment? Are annotated contexts more useful and effective than access to the raw corpus data?

In this study, we will compare translation students' comprehension of a small sample of terms in the field of renewable energies achieved after exploiting either "raw" corpus data in English or French or selected contexts from the same corpora, annotated with frame elements (based on principles of frame semantics, as in the DiCoEnviro) By studying how a sample of approximately 20 students match terms with their definitions from existing resources, we will investigate whether students are better able to differentiate between closely related concepts after studying the annotated contexts as compared to the raw corpus data. By evaluating how these students write their own definitions, we will look for possible differences in definition content and quality when students use the raw and annotated contexts for knowledge acquisition. We hypothesize that richer and more focused information provided by annotated contexts will help students to more accurately identify and describe concepts and differentiate them from others.

Through quantitative analysis of the proportion of correctly identified definitions for participants who consulted either annotated or raw contexts, and qualitative analysis of the accuracy and appropriateness of the written definitions (e.g. the inclusion of key, accurately identified and appropriately expressed defining characteristics), we hope to better evaluate and describe the usefulness of annotating contexts, and ultimately guide the development of terminological resources that can effectively and efficiently assist users in understanding specialized concepts.

Bionote:

Elizabeth Marshman is an Associate Professor at the University of Ottawa's School of Translation and Interpretation and a member of the Observatoire de linguistique Sens-Texte (OLST). Her research focuses on corpus-based applications in terminology and terminological relations in specialized fields.

Marie-Claude L'Homme is a Professor at the Université de Montréal's Département de linguistique et de traduction, Director of the OLST, and head of a team that develops terminological resources including the DiCoEnviro dictionary of environment terminology. She is currently researching applications of the FrameNet methodology in terminology.

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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.

 

 

 

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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.

 

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Translation as an act and event: Exploring the interface
Maureen Ehrensberger-Dow Zurich University of Applied Sciences, Switzerland
Birgitta Englund Dimitrova, Stockholm University, Sweden

Until relatively recently, there has been an invisible line in translation studies between cognitive research (e.g., mental processes, attitudes) and sociological research (status, institutions). This panel focuses on how the translation 'act' is affected by the translation 'event' (cf. Toury 2012). The translation act can be considered what happens in the human brain, the cognitive processes as reflected in observable practices, which has been the focus of much of the translation process research done in the past 20 years. The translation event is seen to involve not only the individual translators and interpreters, but also the agents and organizations that impinge on their situated activities.

For informal enquiries: [ehreATzhawDOTch]

Maureen Ehrensberger-Dow has a PhD in experimental linguistics from the University of Alberta, Canada. She is Professor of Translation Studies at the Institute of Translation and Interpreting, Zurich University of Applied Sciences (ZHAW), Switzerland. Her research interests include translation processes, translation in the news, conceptual transfer, and cognitive ergonomics. She is currently principal investigator of the Cognitive and Physical Ergonomics of Translation research project, a follow-up of the Capturing Translation Processes project.

Birgitta Englund Dimitrova has a PhD in Slavic Linguistics and is Professor Emerita of Translation Studies at Stockholm University, Sweden. Her main research interests are in cognition, bilingualism and translation, as evidenced by her monograph Expertise and Explicitation in the Translation Process (Benjamins, 2005). Recently, she coedited two process-oriented special issues of Translation and Interpreting Studies. She has also published on the interaction in interpreter-mediated encounters and on the translation of dialect in fiction.

 

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SESSION PLAN

PANEL INTRODUCTION (10 minutes): Maureen Ehrensberger-Dow & Birgitta Englund Dimitrova

PART 1: Translation as an Act and Event

PAPER 1 (20 minutes)

Title: Translation in the medical context: specificities of an interdisciplinary and dynamic system

Speaker: Isabel Garcia-Izquierdo, Universitat Jaume I

PAPER 2 (20 minutes)

Title: Translation without the originals: Chinese (auto-)biographical truth across into English

Speaker: Pei Meng, Shanghai University of International Business and Economics

PAPER 3 (20 minutes)

Title: From loner to team player: studying the translator's cognitive processes in a changing professional landscape

Speaker: Birgitta Englund Dimitrova, Stockholm University

PART 1 DISCUSSION (40 minutes)

PART 2: Exploring the interface

PAPER 4 (20 minutes)

Title: Acts, events and the coherence of the conceptual apparatus of cognitive approaches

Speaker: Ricardo Muñoz Martín, Universidad de Las Palmas de Gran Canaria

PAPER 5 (20 minutes)

Title: The situated act of translation: Incorporating feedback loops into the system

Speaker: Maureen Ehrensberger-Dow & Gary Massey, Zurich University of Applied Sciences

PART 2 DISCUSSION (30 minutes)

PANEL WRAP-UP (20 minutes): Maureen Ehrensberger-Dow & Birgitta Englund Dimitrova

 

PAPER TITLES, ABSTRACTS AND BIONOTES

PAPER 1

Title: Translation in the medical context: specificities of an interdisciplinary and dynamic system

Speaker: Isabel Garcia-Izquierdo, Universitat Jaume I

Abstract:

Written medical translation presents some characteristics that make it particularly complex. Firstly, it is an interdisciplinary field, since health professionals (doctors and nurses), experts in translation and languages, and, in the current situation, experts in communication technology are all involved in the medical translation/communication process. Secondly, it takes place in a dynamic context, since it has to respond to social needs (Montalt & García-Izquierdo, forthcoming), especially concerning communication, which can be asymmetrical (expert-to-layman communication), interlinguistic and intercultural. Thus, written medical communication is situated somewhere on a continuum that ranges from popularisation (genres written by experts and addressed to laymen, which sometimes need intergeneric - intra and interlinguistic - translations) to the highest specialisation (expert-to-expert communication; Cabré, 2004), in which equifunctional or equigeneric translation prevails (García-Izquierdo & Montalt, 2014). To deal with the complexity of this interdisciplinary, interlinguistic and multi-oriented (layman and experts) context, the researcher needs to use qualitative (interviews, focus groups, questionnaires, etc.) and quantitative (corpora, expert knowledge management systems, etc.) methods, involving all participants in the communicative process, which enable him/her to triangulate results from different sources. This paper presents the design and first results of the qualitative and quantitative research carried out by the Gentt group (Textual Genres for Translation, http://www.gentt.uji.es) in the context of a research project funded by the Spanish Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad (2013-2015). The practical aim of the research can be understood in terms of both the translation act and the translation event, because it is twofold: i) With regard to the event, to improve written communication aimed at national and foreign patients in the Spanish context (especially hospitals) and thus to improve social interaction and ii) with regard to the act, to provide medical translators (English-Spanish) with useful resources by means of an expert documentation management system (García-Izquierdo & Borja, 2014) that includes a list of patient information genres in English and Spanish; a corpus of real documents; a list of documentary resources; International, European, Spanish, UK and USA legislation related to these genres; and monolingual and bilingual glossaries. It is expected that all these resources will enable translators to improve production of the genres involved in the new context

Bionote: Isabel García-Izquierdo is a professor in Applied Linguistics for Translation in the Department of Translation and Communication at the Universitat Jaume I, in Castellón (Spain). From 2000 onwards, she has been the director of the research group GENTT (Géneros textuales para la traducción, www.gentt.uji.es), which focuses on the multilingual analysis of textual genres in the framework of specialised communication applied to translation. Isabel García-Izquierdo has published several books as well as national and international articles related to her research. She is the President of AIETI (Asociación Ibérica de Estudios de Traducción e Interpretación).

PAPER 2

 

Title: Translation without the originals: Chinese (auto-)biographical truth across into English

Speaker: Pei Meng, Shanghai University of International Business and Economics

Abstract:

This paper examines the cultural, social and ideological factors that have mediated the selection, translation and edition of three Chinese (auto-)biographies into English for British audiences. The three Chinese autobiographies, namely Red Dust by Ma Jian, Daughter of the River by Hong Ying and Good Women of China by Xin Ran, offer accounts of individuals' adversities under the 'Communist China' primarily revolving around the Chinese Cultural Revolution. A remarkable feature about these three works is that the originals had been translated and published, and then became best sellers in the UK, well before the Chinese originals came out in Chinese-speaking countries. To explore 'the system that accounts for what is rather than what ought to be' (Inghilleri 2005: 142), this research, seeing translation as a socially discursive activity, moves away from the textual analysis of the end product towards an examination of the social, political and cultural contexts in which translation acts are constituted (Wolf, 2006). It reports on findings from a qualitative piece of research on the social, interpersonal and institutional dynamics of the translation of Chinese (auto-)biographies and their impacts on the process and outcome of translation. Based on semi-structured interviews with the literary agent, editors, translator and authors who were involved in the various stages of translations, this paper focuses on the mediating position of social agents and their interactive relationships within institutional contexts that shape the final translated output for the British book market. In this research, Bourdieu's concepts of field, capital and habitus, which are essentially concerned with explaining the relationship between individual activity and objective structure (Inghilleri 2003), are employed to analyse the structure of the various fields where translation activity occurs. The translation of Chinese (auto-)biographies is viewed as a network of individual activities within institutionalised fields – literary and publishing fields – that are analysed to examine the logic internal to the field, and the stakes and interests that drive the translation activity and its outcome and product within the UK book market. The habitus of individuals, literary agent and publishers in particular is also analysed in light of the way the participants interact, negotiate and subscribe to rules, conventions and norms, such as the motivation for selecting the unpublished originals for translations, what translation should aim at, how it should be conducted and the way the editing is carried out. My findings suggest that the power relations underpinning the struggles, competitions, negotiations and collaborations within the publishing and literary fields shape the translation production where the social agents involved interact and negotiate to yield the final product for the British book market. The selection process is shown to be a decisive step in the process of translation, which to a great extent shapes the way the Chinese (auto-)biographies have been translated and edited. Translation is therefore conceptualised as operating within the parameters of institutional, cultural and literary conventions that steer the translation activity via complex negotiations embedded in certain power relations that come into play to shape the end-product of translation.

Bionote: Pei Meng works as a lecturer in the School of Foreign Languages, Shanghai University of International Business and Economics, China. She obtained both her MA and PhD degrees in the UK in the field of Translation Studies at the University of Birmingham and the University of Edinburgh, respectively. Her research interests centre on the areas of sociology and culture of translation, translation history and stylistic approach to translation. She teaches courses for both postgraduate and undergraduate students in translation theory, Chinese-English translation, contrastive studies and translation, research methodology as well as stylistics.

PAPER 3

Title: From loner to team player: studying the translator's cognitive processes in a changing professional landscape

Speaker: Birgitta Englund Dimitrova, Stockholm University

Abstract:

Research on the translation process has evolved from its beginnings in the 1980ies into a productive paradigm within Translation Studies (Muñoz 2014). Original points of departure were theories and methodologies mainly from psycholinguistics and cognitive psychology, with data elicited mainly from short whole translation tasks performed alone by translators or students, and after some time, with due attention to ecological validity. Conclusions were drawn e.g. on different processes depending upon experience or under various experimental conditions, regarding the execution of the task and its subtasks (reading the source text, drafting the target text, revising while drafting, revising after drafting, etc.), as well as on problems and decision-making. However, in the last decade or so, IT and globalization have profoundly changed the translation profession(s): in the growing translation industry, there is increasing task specialization and cooperation, and translation management, other-revision, TM and MT + post-editing are regular parts of the process. Hence, the design of many process studies, both earlier and more recent, seems to reflect a translation concept that is in many ways outdated: a short source text and a lonely individual, doing the whole task herself. This raises the question of the validity of the findings of such process studies in these new professional contexts. Against a short background on recent translation profession developments, the main body of this presentation builds on two analyses, which are compared and contrasted: 1. a meta-analysis of selected earlier process studies on tasks and subtasks in the translation process; 2. an analysis of approx. 15 hours of interviews with approx. 10 very experienced Swedish translators, regarding their habitual translation process. Guided by questions based on results of earlier process studies, the interviews elucidate differences in approach and processing, depending on the amount of cooperation with other actors in the overall process and task division, but also source text length, text type and on individual process characteristics. The principal question to be answered is: To what extent are findings from earlier process studies, where the cognitive processes of "the loner" were analyzed (translating as an act, cf. Toury 2012, Chesterman 2013), also relevant and valid in contexts characterized by distributed tasks, where the translation process needs to be conceptualized as an event (Toury, Chesterman)?

Bionote: Birgitta Englund Dimitrova has a PhD in Slavic Linguistics and is Professor Emerita of Translation Studies at Stockholm University, Sweden. Her main research interest is in cognition, bilingualism and translation, as evidenced by her monograph Expertise and Explicitation in the Translation Process (John Benjamins, 2005). She has also published on the interaction in interpreter-mediated encounters and on the translation of dialect in fiction. Her current research project, "The translator's individual space", investigates individual characteristics in the process and the target texts of very experienced translators working from more than one source language.

PAPER 4

Title: Acts, events and the coherence of the conceptual apparatus of cognitive approaches

Speaker: Ricardo Muñoz Martín, Universidad de Las Palmas de Gran Canaria

Abstract:

Toury (2012: 67–68) distinguishes a cognitive dimension, or translation act, and a sociological dimension, or translation event, in every instance of translating. Chesterman (2013) adds a third dimension, that of translation practice, to study translation against the larger landscape of historical and cultural evolution. These distinctions seem appropriate when the field is considered as a whole, and sociological approaches are certainly needed for and welcome in a truly comprehensive and multidisciplinary Translation Studies. However, the goals, assumptions and methods of one TS strand are not necessarily compatible with those from another one, sometimes not even within a given framework. For instance, Olohan (2011) has warned about a possible terminological and conceptual clash within the sociology of translation (e.g., Wolf & Fukari 2007), and several researchers (e.g., Ehrensberger-Dow, Muñoz, O'Brien, Risku) have called for updating the cognitive paradigm used as a reference for translation process research. Crucially, nothing prevents the translation process from being studied from perspectives other than cognitive translatology (e.g., computer science, anthropology); there is also nothing in translation events that makes them exclusive territory for sociological approaches. Multidisciplinarity does not entail a division of labor—i.e., a compartmentalization of the object of study. It results from the potential overlap of comprehensive analyses of the full object of study. Cognitive translatology (Muñoz 2010a, 2010b) uses embodied-embedded cognition as a referential framework and, in order to ensure internal coherence, also draws from it and from (cognitive) social psychology to study the interpersonal and cultural aspects of the cognitive processes of translators, interpreters and other agents, such as addressees. When translating is approached as an embodied-embedded activity—and not only as a rational, conscious problem-solving process or a sequence of problem-solving processes—each instance of translating is cognitively situated in a social, historical and cultural milieu. Cognition is enacted by the brain but in a constant interplay with "external" factors. Thus, current cognitive models of translating need to be enlarged to cover translation acts, events, and practices because they are only different aspects of cognitive experiences and processes: the translation act includes the translation event and unfolds along the lines of a given translation practice, and they all are built and represented in the mind of the translator and impact on her performance. This stance will be supported with references to recent works by several researchers but also with empirical data from a set of small-scale studies.

Bionote: Ricardo Muñoz has been a freelance translator since 1987 and was ATA certified for English-Spanish in 1991. Muñoz is the coordinator of the research team "Expertise & Environment in Translation" (PETRA, Spanish acronym), which focuses on the empirical research of the cognitive processes of translators and interpreters. He is also a member of the TREC Network. Muñoz is currently Professor in Translation Studies at the Universidad de Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain. This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. Brief CV: http://www.mendeley.com/profiles/ricardo-munoz-martin/ Selected publications: https://ulpgc.academia.edu/RicardoMunoz

PAPER 5

Title: The situated act of translation: Incorporating feedback loops into the system

Speaker: Maureen Ehrensberger-Dow & Gary Massey, Zurich University of Applied Sciences

Abstract:

Professional translation is a cognitive activity that is necessarily situated in a physical setting within an organizational structure. Most translators work within dynamic systems that require various degrees of collaboration with clients, peers, and other colleagues coupled with intensive human-computer interactions. In addition to the usual office equipment and communication systems, the typical setting of professional translation includes language technology tools designed to relieve translators of repetitive tasks and to increase their efficiency. The implicit assumption behind deploying such tools is to have machines do what they do best in order to let humans do what they do best – creative work requiring intense use of cognitive resources. The organization usually determines which tools are appropriate for which tasks, with more, less, or even no input from the ultimate users. Time and economic pressures often preclude the good practice of structured, systematic feedback loops.

On the basis of a large corpus of translation processes recorded at professional translators' workplaces over the past few years as well as translator commentaries, interviews, and survey results, we claim that the increasing segmentation of the translation process and consequent increased number of agents involved in the translation 'event' (cf. Chesterman 2006, 2009) is restricting translators' autonomy and decision-making in the cognitive 'act' of translating (cf. Toury 2012). While engaging in a demanding bilingual cognitive activity, the translators we have observed and interviewed indicate that they are struggling to manage their responsibilities to a range of actors and factors (the source text, target language norms, readership needs, client style guides, and reputation issues) as they deal with the economic and temporal pressures to which they and their organizations are subject (cf. Ehrensberger-Dow & Massey 2013). Findings from our workplace studies suggest that disturbances in the workflow or non-optimal ergonomic conditions can throw this complex system out of balance, increasing translators' mental load (cf. Muñoz 2012) and potentially preventing them from using language technology efficiently or from producing the quality that they are capable of. In addition, the professional translators we have investigated often have little opportunity to receive constructive feedback on their work, actively increase their expertise, or express their needs to language technology developers. We argue that it is not enough to rely on advances in external language resources or on cursory target-text revision processes. Instead, organizations would do well to exploit the expert knowledge of their human translators by incorporating effective feedback loops into every stage of the workflow.

Bionote: Maureen Ehrensberger-Dow is Professor of Translation Studies, teaching on the BA and MA programmes in the ZHAW Institute of Translation and Interpreting. She is principal investigator of three nationally funded research projects, two of which focus on translation workplace processes and the cognitive and physical ergonomics of translation. This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

Gary Massey is deputy head of the Institute of Translation and Interpreting at the Zurich University of Applied Sciences (ZHAW), director of its MA in Applied Linguistics and past head of its undergraduate degree programmes. His research interests include translation processes, translation pedagogy, and information literacy for translators. This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

 

 

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New Directions in Cognitive and Empirical Translation Research
Riitta Jääskeläinen, University of Eastern Finland
Séverine Hubscher-Davidson, Aston University, Birmingham
Isabel Lacruz, Kent State University, Ohio, USA

Cognitive research in translation and interpreting has reached a critical threshold of maturity that is triggering rapid expansion along several innovative paths. Some of these might be grouped under three areas which have recently grown in popularity: (1) innovative methodologies, (2) translation expertise, and (3) translation utility. This panel, which includes contributions that investigate new directions in these areas, is intended as a platform to explore and exchange views on the future development of cognitive and empirical translation research.

Innovative methodologies: One key driver of expansion in the field is the development and use of diverse empirical and experimental methodologies, which are often borrowed or adapted from other disciplines. New approaches, which increasingly involve multiple data sources, sometimes both qualitative and quantitative, are beginning to provide very rich information on all aspects of translation as a cognitive activity, including the roles of affect and metacognition. Large scale standardization of research instruments including questionnaires and on-line tools for extraction and manipulation of shared data will enable researchers to move beyond the limitations of case studies to carry out research at scale that allows for substantial generalization.

Translation expertise: More effective methodologies in cognitively oriented translation research are yielding deeper understanding of the nature and acquisition of translation competence and the development of translation expertise. This new knowledge will help guide the training of future translators as they develop into fully-fledged professionals. It will also positively impact the work of translators as they strive to effectively meet workplace needs and expectations.

Translation utility: Prior research has often focused on evaluating translations in terms of how accurately they transfer information between languages, according to semantic, syntactic, stylistic, cultural, and other similar standards. Increasingly, however, the basis of evaluation is moving toward judgment of utility – in other words, measuring how effortful it is for end-users to use a translation and how well it meets their needs. This change in focus is partly driven by increased need for post-editing of machine translations and the desirability of tuning machine translation output to minimize effort for post-editors rather than maximize formal accuracy. For this it is especially important to understand and measure the nature of cognitive effort in various aspects of the translation process, a theme that is explored by several contributors to this panel.

For informal enquiries: [riittaDOTjaaskelainenATuefDOTfi]

Riitta Jääskeläinen, (University of Eastern Finland) is Professor of English (translation and interpreting). Her teaching includes practical translation as well as research-related courses and thesis supervision. Her research interests in the area of translation process research include methodology and translators' expertise. She has published overview articles on think-aloud (Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies, Benjamins Handbook of Translation Studies, vol. 1), translation process research (Oxford Handbook of Translation Studies) and translation psychology (Benjamins Handbook of Translation Studies, vol. 3).

Séverine Hubscher-Davidson (Kent State University) is Assistant Professor of Translation Studies. She teaches doctoral courses on empirical research methods for translation, and translation and cognition, as well as master level translation practice courses. Lacruz' current research interests include investigation of the mental processes involved in translation and post-editing. She has published theoretical and empirical articles on cognitive aspects of translation and post-editing.

Isabel Lacruz (Aston University, Birmingham) is a Lecturer in Translation Studies. She teaches both translation theory and practice, and her research interests are in the areas of translation process research, translators' personalities and emotional intelligence, as well as individual differences more generally. She has published articles mainly on psychological aspects of the translation process, and is currently working on a book on the topic of emotionality in translation.

 

See other thematic panels

Each paper is allocated with a 20 minutes time slot + 10 minutes discussion.

Discussion time at the end of each paper

Introduction: Riitta Jääskeläinen (10 minutes)

PART 1: Translation expertise/Innovative methodologies

Chair: Isabel Lacruz

PAPER 1:

Title: Tolerance for Ambiguity and the Translation Profession: A New Direction for Empirical Research in Translation

Speaker: Séverine Hubscher-Davidson, Aston University

PAPER 2:

Title: The role of expertise in emotion regulation: Exploring the effect of expertise on translation performance under emotional stir

Speakers: Ana Mª Rojo López and Marina Ramos Caro, University of Murcia

PAPER 3:

Title: The mind behind - Attributive metacognition in translation and its effect on the translator

Speaker: Annegret Sturm, University of Geneva

PAPER 4:

Title: Translation process differences between literary and technical translators

Speakers: Kristian Tangsgaard Hvelplund, University of Copenhagen, and Barbara Dragsted, Copenhagen Business School

PART 2: Translation utility

Chair: Séverine Hubscher-Davidson

PAPER 5:

Title: How editors read: An eye-tracking study of the effects of editorial experience and task instruction on reading behavior

Speaker: Melanie Ann Law, North-West University

PAPER 6:

Title: Studying the dynamics of term creation in European equally authentic texts in 24 official language versions

Speaker: Rita Temmerman, VrijeUniversiteit Brussel

PAPER 7:

Title: Cognitive Effort in Machine Translation Post-Editing: A Mixed-Method Approach

Speaker: Lucas Nunes Vieira, Newcastle University

PAPER 8:

Title: Cognitive effort in human translation and post-editing: an analysis of pupil dilation and fixation duration on metaphors

Speaker: Arlene Koglin, Federal University of Minas Gerais

PAPER 9:

Title: Source text features and their relationship to cognitive demand and cognitive effort in post-editing

Speaker: Isabel Lacruz, Kent State University

Wrap-up session (10 minutes): Riitta Jääskeläinen

PAPER TITLES, ABSTRACTS AND BIONOTES

PAPER 1:

Title: Tolerance for ambiguity and the translation profession: A new direction for empirical research in translation

Speaker: Séverine Hubscher-Davidson, Aston University

Abstract:

There is a growing need to describe the profile of participants in translation process research and to draw inferences between individual traits and translation competences (Saldanha and O'Brien 2013: 146). Muñoz Martín argues that scores from an intelligence test could become a predictor of translation success (2010: 92), but recent evidence suggests that personalities and other individual differences may also have some explanatory power for success in translation (e.g. Hubscher-Davidson 2009). The potential links between participant profiles and translation quality are interesting to investigate as they increase our understanding of the different psychological mechanisms at play in translation, and could help students assess their own strengths and weaknesses as translators (Jääskeläinen 2012: 194). In this paper, the Tolerance for Ambiguity (TA) personality trait will be discussed in the context of professional translation, and the following research questions will be explored: does TA increase with professional experience in translation? Does TA predict translators' job satisfaction or job success? Is TA an important trait for personality profiling in translation?

Due to the very nature of translation, tolerating ambiguity is clearly a key skill. Translators are continuously faced with having to make difficult translation decisions and, more often than not, there is no right answer but many possible alternative solutions to the translation of a ST segment. Benjamin (2012: 40) acknowledged this tricky aspect of a translator's work: "Precisely because the meaning of the original formulation, the one to be translated, is not singular, translation begins with the 'ambiguous'". In addition, tolerance for ambiguity is said to be positively related to "performance in the global work environment and in cross-cultural settings" (Herman et al 2010). Therefore, being able to perceive ambiguous situations as desirable, or at least non-threatening, and reacting well to unfamiliar and complex stimuli, are clearly essential components of successful translation performance. It is therefore interesting to investigate the relationship between professional translators' performance and their ability to cope with change, ambiguity, and conflicting perspectives.

In this interdisciplinary study, a number of professional translators were contacted over the space of 3 months in 2014, and asked to fill in (1) a background questionnaire and (2) the Tolerance for Ambiguity Scale (TAS). A total of 91 professional translators took part in the study. The TAS is new to empirical translation research, though it has been successfully employed in other multilingual contexts (e.g. Dewaele and Wei 2013). Both questionnaires were internet-based, as this is said to reduce social desirability and enabled the participation of a large number of translators. The aim was to explore, with an innovative psychometric instrument, an under-researched aspect of translators' personalities and its relationship with work performance. The TAS contains items reflecting ambiguous stimuli commonly experienced in multilingual contexts, and can therefore be used in cross-cultural research and practice. In this paper, I will present the main results of the study, explain the methods employed, and discuss the potential importance of TA as a new direction for personality profiling in translation process research.

Bionote:

Séverine Hubscher-Davidson is a Lecturer in Translation Studies at Aston University, Birmingham. She teaches both translation theory and practice, and her research interests are in the areas of translation process research, translators' personalities and emotional intelligence, as well as individual differences more generally. She has published articles mainly on psychological aspects of the translation process, and is currently working on a book on the topic of emotionality in translation.

PAPER 3:

Title: Investigating emotional aspects of the translation process: an interdisciplinary methodological framework

Speaker: Caroline Lehr, University of Geneva

Abstract:

Translation processes have only over the past decades become the subject of systematic empirical studies and methodologies in process-oriented research need to be developed further. As the improvement of methodology continues to be an important topic, translation researchers are particularly concerned with finding methods that enable deeper insights into the nature of decision-making processes during translation. In psychology, numerous research has demonstrated the importance of emotion for human decision-making, however, their importance for the translation process has to date scarcely been considered and process research lacks appropriate methods for the investigation of emotional aspects.

To address this gap, the present paper briefly outlines how emotions are seen within the componential view of emotion and how emotions can exert influences on human decision-making. It then focuses on how these influences can be tested empirically by presenting an interdisciplinary methodological framework which integrates current methods used in translation process research and methods used in psychological research to induce and measure emotions. The framework is situated within the mixed-methods paradigm, allowing for a flexible integration and weighting of both quantitative and qualitative methods, and comprises four groups of methods: 1) emotion induction procedures, 2) online measures of emotion, 3) offline measures of emotion, and 4) assessments of inter-individual differences. Whereas the first group includes emotion induction procedures used in psychological research, such as bogus performance feedback, social interaction, or music; the second and third groups are based on online- and offline-methods used in translation process research, which are complemented by psychological assessments of emotional responding and are subdivided accordingly into the three categories of emotion measures: self-reports of emotional experience (valence/arousal scales, assessments of discrete emotions), physiological measures (brain states, activity of the autonomic nervous system), and behavior (behavioral expression of emotion, assessments of task performance during an emotional state). In the fourth group, relevant psychometric assessments, as for example instruments to assess emotional intelligence or emotion regulation strategies, complement assessments of inter-individual differences already employed in translation process research. The methods included in the four groups are outlined and their strengths and weaknesses are assessed, as well as their suitability for studies emphasizing ecological validity or experimental control and research addressing basic or more applied questions. Finally, the paper exemplifies how the different methods can be combined for designing experimental and correlational studies in translation process research that wish to empirically address the multiple questions that arise from the fact that emotion is a central organizing construct of human cognition.

Bionote:

Caroline Lehr studied translation at the University of Geneva and the University of Heidelberg. After graduation, she became a teaching and research assistant at the University of Geneva and was responsible for translation classes at Bachelor and Masters level. For her PhD, which she received in 2014, she conducted interdisciplinary research in collaboration with the Swiss Center for Affective Sciences.

PAPER 2:

Title: The role of expertise in emotion regulation: Exploring the effect of expertise on translation performance under emotional stir

Speakers: Ana Mª Rojo López and Marina Ramos Caro, University of Murcia

Abstract:

The influence of emotions on the translation process has been so far barely explored in translation process research. But new views on cognition adopted in recent years have cleared the ground to explore the role that psychological and emotional factors play in the translation process. Regarding emotion, the work by Lehr (2013) has recently proposed an empirical approach to research the impact of emotion on translation performance. Her research suggests that positive emotions may enhance facets of creativity in translation, in particular on idiomatic expressions and stylistic adequacy, whereas negative emotions may foster accuracy in translating terminology. Results of her work indicate that positive and negative emotions may trigger different processing styles. Other pioneering work that has also argued that emotion regulation may affect translation performance is that of Hubscher-Davidson (2013). She has shown that personality traits like intuition or emotional intelligence also play a role in regulating translators' behaviour and can lend support to more successful translating. But the question still remains as to the role that professional expertise may play in the process of emotion regulation and the final quality of their performance.

The present study aims to investigate the influence that expertise may exert on emotion regulation and its consequences for translation performance. Our study replicates Lehr's methodology, but also explores the influence of personality factors and level of expertise on the induced emotional impact. The experiment compares the performance of translation students with that of professional translators and assesses trait variation in the participants' psychological resilience (Block and Kremen's ego-resiliency scale (ER89)) and creativity (CREA, Torrance Test of Creative Thinking). Participants were asked to provide a translation of an emotional text, which was rated for accuracy and creativity. Later, they were randomly assigned to a positive or negative feedback group and received false feedback on their performance. Immediately afterwards they were asked to translate a second text, whose ratings for accuracy and creativity were compared to those from their first translation. A retrospective interview was finally carried out to obtain data on the participants' subjective feelings. Results of the study suggest that personality factors and level of expertise play a decisive role in regulating emotion and guiding translational behaviour and may foster enhanced translation performance even in emotionally stirring situations.

Bionote:

Ana Rojo is Senior Lecturer in Translation at the University of Murcia (Spain), where she has been Head of the Translation and Interpreting Department for five years and is currently Coordinator of the Master of Editorial Translation and President of the PhD Commission. Her main areas of research are the fields of Translation and Cognitive Linguistics. She has authored and co-edited several books and monograph issues and written many scholarly articles which have appeared either in specialised national and international journals or as book chapters published by several national and international publishing houses

PAPER 3

Title: The mind behind - Attributive metacognition in translation and its effect on the translator

Speaker: Annegret Sturm,University of Geneva

Abstract:

In the context of translation, the term "metacognition" is most often used to refer to the translator's monitoring processes (Angelone 2010) or his/her awareness of the his/her own knowledge during the translation process (Hurtado Albir 2010). However, this type of self-referring metacognition (evaluative metacognition, Proust 2013) is not the only form of metacognition involved in translation. Even more central is the representation of other minds (Sperber 2000), also called "attributive metacognition" (Proust 2013). Although different branches of translation studies agree that translation is in itself a form of metarepresentation (Gutt 2000, Wolff 2002, Sturge 2007), one of the major implications of this fundamental claim has received little attention up to now, namely that translators are dealing with the content of other minds (Wilss 1992). Based on Hermans (2007), I shall argue that translation is a higher-order metarepresentation. Being the main agent in an "other-directed act" (Robinson 2001), the translator has to metarepresent two minds during the translation process, the source text author and the target audience. Its triadic nature makes translation a special form of communication. As a hybrid form of reported speech it can neither be classified as quotation nor as indirect speech. These distinctive features of translation should result in an enhanced metacognitive effort as compared to standard communication. Translators who are constantly operating on this higher metacognitive level should thus have a higher cognitive proficiency than non-translators. Developmental psychologists call our capacity of representing another person's mind 'Theory of Mind' (ToM). ToM develops throughout life (Kobayashi 2008) just as our pragmatic competence continues to evolve up to adulthood (Cummings 2007). Bilingualism is found to have an influence on ToM performance in children (Kovács 2009).

To test the hypothesis whether translation enhances metacognitive proficiency, I triangulated data of three experiments comparing students with two different levels of translation training (BA/ MA) using fMRI, eye tracking, key logging and translation quality analysis. Results of the fMRI study show that the metacognitive network is implicated in the translation condition. The behavioural data show that MA students have a clear advantage over BA students in terms of text comprehension and processing in the metacognitively demanding condition. However, the analysis of the translation products indicates that BA students develop strategies to compensate for their lack of metacognitive sensitivity in order to produce results which are comparable to those of MA students. Overall, this paper makes a point for transdisciplinarity in translation research. Translation does not only share common theoretical frameworks with other fields, but also contributes to them in a relevant way. As the world's population is becoming increasingly bilingual, life sciences encourage more research into translation (Abutalebi & Green 2007). Furthermore, psychologists have advocated for more ToM research in adults (Apperly 2014). Translation offers great potential for the study of the macrofeatures of understanding.

Bionote:

Annegret Sturm studied Interpreting, Translation and Pragmatics at the Universities of Leipzig and Geneva. She has been working as a professional translator in a think tank and specialized as a freelance translator in medical translation. Her research on the translator and translation competence is funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation.

PAPER 4:

Title: Translation process differences between literary and technical translators

Speaker: Kristian Tangsgaard Hvelplund, University of Copenhagen, and Barbara Dragsted, Copenhagen Business School

Abstract:

It is common that translators specialise in certain domains and prefer working with specific text genres. Focussing on a few familiar text types rather than working with many different genres and topics allows the translator to gain experience and build up specialised expertise for those specific types of text. Consequently, technical translators are for example reluctant to take on literary translation jobs, and literary translators generally stay clear of technical texts. The relationship between text genre preference and familiarity and cognitive processing of translation has received only little attention in Translation Studies (Sannholm 2010). Differences in processing behaviours between literary translation and non-literary translation have not been studied systematically, and it is not yet known how translators process text genres that they are not very familiar with. Addressing these issues could add a new dimension to the characterisation of different translation styles and profiles (Dragsted and Carl 2013), and generate new insights into how translators behave when faced with a non-familiar task requiring them to rely on a different set of strategies and competences (e.g. Shreve 1997).

This paper presents the findings from a joint research project carried out at the University of Copenhagen and the Copenhagen Business School. The project aims at identifying and comparing processing behaviours of two groups of translators: 10 translators specialising in literary translation and 10 translators specialising in technical translation. The translators in both groups translate both a literary text and a technical text, i.e. they carry out both a familiar and a non-familiar task. Data from eye tracking, keylogging and retrospective interviews from the two groups of translators are recorded in a series of data collection sessions. The project thus triangulates qualitative and quantitative methods. In addition, it uses a novel method of presenting process data by means of overlaying translation progression graphs (Carl et al. 2011). The quality of the quantitative process data are carefully and thoroughly assessed (Hvelplund 2014) and the data are analysed inferentially using linear mixed-effects regression modelling (LMER) (cf. e.g. Baayen 2009, Balling and Hvelplund forthcoming) in order to be able to make more confident generalizations. The specific research aims of the project are to: 1) identify processing behaviour and strategies shared by literary translators and technical translators; 2) identify processing behaviour and strategies, which are unique to either literary or technical translators working with familiar text genres; 3) compare the processing behaviour and strategies involved in the translation of familiar text genres with the behaviour and strategies involved in the translation of non-familiar genres. Thus, the project aims on the one hand to gain more insight into the special competences and expertise associated with literary and technical translation respectively, and on the other hand to identify behavioural characteristics which are not apparently genre-dependent. Furthermore, the study will investigate if and to what extent experienced translators fall back on behaviour and strategies generally associated with novices when working with non-familiar genres.

Bionote:

Kristian Tangsgaard Hvelplund is Assistant Professor in the Department of English, Germanic and Romance Studies at the University of Copenhagen. He teaches courses on literary translation and on cognitive aspects of translation, and his research focuses on cognitive processes in translation, including audiovisual translation, and processes in reading and writing. Barbara Dragsted is Associate Professor at the Department of International Business Communication, Copenhagen Business School, where she is a member of the CRITT center. She teaches business communication and specialised translation, and her research interests include cognitive processes in translation and LSP translation and communication.

PART 2: Translation utility

PAPER 5:

Title: How editors read: An eye-tracking study of the effects of editorial experience and task instruction on reading behavior

Speaker: Melanie Ann Law, North-West University

Abstract:

Eye-tracking has been used as a method to study reading and the online operations involved in reading for several decades. While the focus of this research has mostly been on the processing of words and strings of words, attention is now shifting to reading behaviour as it relates to whole texts. One of the questions that has received attention is how reading behaviour changes depending on task instruction and task experience. This question has been the focus of several recent studies in the fields of translation and proofreading (as a component of the writing process). However, although reading is a critical process in the work of editors, to date there is no research on the reading behaviour of professional editors.

This paper reports on the preliminary findings of a pilot study that made use of eye-tracking to compare the reading behaviour of two groups of participants: editors and non-editors. The aims of the study were to establish if editors' reading behaviour exhibited differences when compared to non-editors, and across two reading tasks (reading for comprehension and reading with the aim to edit). Existing research on translation and proofreading has demonstrated that task instructions influence reading behaviour (Schotter et al., 2014; Göpferich et al., 2008). Studies on reading behaviour in translation have also suggested that experience may account for differences in reading behaviour (Jakobsen & Jensen, 2008). Based on this, this study hypothesised that there would be differences in the way editor and non-editor participants read texts, that task instructions to read for different purposes would lead to a change in reading behaviour for both groups, and that the instruction to read with the aim to edit would particularly strongly influence editors' reading. To test these hypotheses, differences in eye-tracking measures were examined. Specifically, the dependent variables of fixation duration, total fixation count, saccade length, total saccade count, and total task time, as they relate to the independent variables of experience and task instruction, were investigated.

Bionote:

Melanie Law is a lecturer in Language Practice at the North-West University's Vaal Triangle campus. Melanie holds an MA in Language Practice and is currently enrolled for a PhD in Language Practice. Her most recent publication explores the various factors that influence the work and tasks of professional editors. Her current research focuses on the integration of process-oriented methodologies in the investigation of professional editorial work.

PAPER 6:

Title: Studying the dynamics of term creation in European equally authentic texts in 24 official language versions

Speaker: Rita Temmerman, VrijeUniversiteit Brussel

Abstract:

According to Shuibhne (2008) the European multilingual policy amounts to little more than a 'myth of equality' among languages. Most of the European information flow moves from an original draft in Euro-English to official translations into Euro-varieties of (in principle and at least) all the other 23 languages (Euro-Italian, Euro-Dutch, Euro-Maltese, Euro-Finnish, etc.). In earlier work the dynamics of terminological understanding and the impact of terminology creation in a socio-cognitive multilingual reality was described and it was demonstrated that translators are at the basis of many coinages in the target languages that are given equivalent status to neologisms in Euro-English. This means that translators are involved in what Sager (1990: 80) calls "secondary term formation". In the present contribution we discuss European secondary term formation in translations against the background of recent insights in several disciplines. We start from the concept of "interlingual uncertainty", which is --as Cao (2003) demonstrates--, a characteristic of all bilingual and multilingual legal texts. Then we go into the need for balance between precision and vagueness, a requirement for all legal documents. On one hand a legal text has to be maximally determinate and precise, on the other hand the text has to cover every relevant situation and therefore some vagueness is essential. Yet vagueness may cause problems in a setting of "equal authenticity" as explained by Schilling (2010). Europe pledges allegiance to the protection of legitimate expectations and to the non-discrimination principle. The mix of the EU's equal authenticity principle, conceptual divergence, cultural load of terminology combined with misinterpretations of translators can cause serious problems. It is quite common that equally authentic language versions of a Community Law have different interpretations if taken on their own. Yet a citizen has every reason and the right to trust his or her own language version. We will use examples to illustrate that how a term is interpreted may depend on several contextual factors, even though the rule of law forms part of a shared European cultural space. When translating European texts, translators should be aware of these factors in order to achieve optimal quality in secondary term formation. Insights from cultural terminology theory (Diki-Kidiri 2008) may benefit the quality of secondary term formation.

Bionote:

Rita Temmerman is Professor in translation, multilingual intercultural communication and terminology studies at Department of Applied Linguistics, VrijeUniversiteit Brussel (CVC). Her research contributed to the sociocognitive approach in terminology management. The research focus is on several issues related to the translation of special language in general and terminology in particular, such as: application-oriented terminology analysis, dynamic multilingual neology creation, terminological variation in a multilingual setting, multilingual terminology and cognition, terminology harmonisation within the EU, understanding terminology in cognitive, linguistic, situational and cultural contexts, metaphor studies, dynamic systems in language, culture-bound understanding, terminology engineering software (using natural language processing technology).

PAPER 7:

Title: Cognitive effort in machine translation post-editing: A mixed-method approach

Speaker: Lucas Nunes Vieira, Newcastle University

Abstract:

In view of the popularity of machine translation (MT) post-editing (PE) as a solution to the ever-increasing demands placed on human translation, PE effort and its measurement have quickly become common topics of investigation in Translation Studies and related fields, with research findings having applications that involve the estimation of pay rates in PE as well as a more robust prediction of raw MT output quality. In this talk, a mixed-method approach to the investigation of cognitive effort in PE will be presented in the context of a study involving an analysis of think-aloud protocols (TAPs) carried out through the lens of large-scale eye-tracking and key-logging data.

The study sets out to uncover qualitative information regarding the nature of mental processes taking place at task moments corresponding to different estimated levels of the effort experienced by participants, also providing insights into methodological aspects pertaining to a converging use of automatic logs and TAPs. At an initial stage (S1) of the investigation, nineteen subjects were asked to post-edit English machine translations of excerpts of two French news articles in tasks that involved eye tracking, key logging and a sentence level measurement of perceived mental effort based on a scale borrowed from the field of Educational Psychology. TAPs were not used at this stage to avoid any potential interference they could have with automatic logs and participants' perceptions. In a subsequent stage (S2), a new sample of nine participants, comparable to the previous sample in source language proficiency, previous experience, and sentiment towards MT, was asked to post-edit the same texts, but now under a think-aloud condition. This dual setting enabled a contrast of large-scale information gathered in S1 with in-depth think-aloud data gathered in S2. Preliminary results are indicative of potential connections between different levels of cognitive effort and the different aspects of the activity participants focus on, such as grammar, lexis, and readership-specific issues. A preliminary analysis of the data is also suggestive of the potential of TAPs when used as a tool to carry out qualitative analyses informed by large-scale quantitative data. Despite having come under criticism in recent years, TAPs have the advantage of providing information that lies at a deeper level in comparison with automatic logs. Automatic logging methods, on the other hand, are certainly attractive in view of their relative objectivity and less invasive nature. In view of the advantages that are inherent to both methods, this talk is hoped to provide insights into how TAPs and automatic logs can be combined in a strategy that tentatively avoids a trade-off scenario which at first sight may seem inevitable. Further details regarding potential links between TAPs and eye tracking as indices of cognitive effort in PE are also provided, constituting, to the best knowledge of the author, the first study where information of this kind is made available in the context of PE, with findings that are hoped to also inform cognitive investigations in translation as well as traditional revision.

Bionote:

Lucas Nunes Vieira is a PhD student in Translation Studies at Newcastle University, in the UK. After completing a Linguistics and Modern Languages degree in Brazil, he did a joint MA in Natural Language Processing and Human Language Technology at the University of Algarve in Portugal, and the University of Franche-Comté in France. In the past seven years he has also worked as an editor and translator for publishers in Brazil and in the UK.

PAPER 8:

Title: Cognitive effort in human translation and post-editing: an analysis of pupil dilation and fixation duration on metaphors

Speaker: Arlene Koglin, Federal University of Minas Gerais

Abstract:

The combination of temporal, technical and cognitive effort has been proposed as metrics to evaluate the feasibility of post-editing (Krings, 2001). Whereas temporal and technical effort are easier to measure, cognitive effort is more complex and therefore may require a combination of measures in order to have more reliable results, as well as a deeper understanding of cognitive processing. Translation process research usually relies on fixation duration and fixation count to measure cognitive effort; however, more recent studies have tested pupil size as an indicator of cognitive processing. Experimental evidence from Interpreting Studies (Hyönä, Tommola & Alaja, 1995) suggests that pupil size reflects momentary variations in processing load during a translation task. Their findings also indicate that words that are more difficult to translate induced higher levels of pupil dilation than easily translatable words. These results are encouraging with respect to the use of pupil dilation as an indicator of variation in cognitive processing, but further translation-process-driven studies are necessary to test the validity of pupil dilation as a standard measure of cognitive effort.

This presentation reports on an empirical study analyzing cognitive effort required to translate from scratch in comparison to post-editing a machine-translated output. More specifically, the study has two objectives. First, we aim at investigating the cognitive effort required to post-edit machine-translated metaphors compared to the translation of metaphors by analyzing differences between fixation duration and pupil dilation in areas of interest (AOIs) in source and target texts. The second aim is to test whether the pupillary response can be applied to study cognitive processing by correlating it with fixation duration, which is a well-established measure of cognitive effort in translation process studies. We hypothesized that a) translating metaphors from scratch would require more cognitive effort than post-editing them, and b) pupil dilation would have a positive correlation with fixation duration. In order to test these hypotheses, an experiment was carried out at the Laboratory for Experimentation in Translation (LETRA) under two different conditions. The control group was asked to translate a 224-word newspaper text whereas the experimental group was asked to post-edit a machine- translated output of the same source text. The multimethod data collection included eye tracking, key logging and retrospective protocols. For the purposes of this paper, eye-tracking data related to fixation duration and pupil size during the translation and post-editing of five metaphors are analyzed. Preliminary results indicate that the cognitive effort required to post-edit conventional metaphors is lower than translating them from scratch. However, creative metaphors are more cognitively demanding to be post-edited in comparison to translating them from scratch. Similarly to Hvelplund's (2014) findings, our initial analysis provides indications that fixation duration and pupil dilation are positively correlated. The corroboration of this trend in subsequent analyses may contribute to the validation of this measure as a standard indicator of cognitive processing.

Bionote:

Arlene Koglin is a PhD candidate (expected date of completion: March 2015) in Translation Studies at Federal University of Minas Gerais (Brazil). Her PhD thesis focus on the cognitive effort required to post-edit metaphors and to translate them from scratch.

PAPER 9

Title: Source text features and their relationship to cognitive demand and cognitive effort in post-editing

Speaker: Isabel Lacruz, Kent State University

Abstract:

Our objective is to contribute to identify source text features that are associated with increased levels of cognitive effort during post-editing of machine translation (MT) output. Recent work (Lacruz et al. 2012; Lacruz & Shreve 2013) has identified pause metrics as indicators of cognitive effort in post-editing. The simplest of these is the pause to word ratio (PWR), the number of pauses per word in a post-edited segment. Processing rate is another intrinsic measure of cognitive effort (Koponen et al. 2012). Cognitive effort by post-editors is the result of cognitive demand placed on them by errors that need to be corrected in MT output. It is commonly measured by quality metrics.

MT quality has routinely been measured by subjective human judgments and by automatic metrics that measure in various ways how close MT output is to a reference translation. One commonly used automatic metric is HTER (Snover et. al. 2006), which is a form of edit to word ratio, using the post-edited product as a reference translation. Both human quality judgments and HTER are extrinsic measures of MT quality, and so of cognitive demand. Recently, Lacruz et al. (2014), building on work of Lacruz and Muñoz (2014), proposed error to word ratio (EWR), the number of errors per word in an MT segment, as an intrinsic measure of MT quality. For post-editing of Spanish to English MT output, they found strong correlations between PWR, EWR, HTER, and human judgments of MT quality.

The current work examines which source text features correspond to different levels of cognitive demand imposed by MT output on post-editors, and of cognitive effort made by post-editors. We triangulate data from multiple modalities, including eye tracking, mouse tracking, and keystroke logging. In particular, we revisit the relationship between negative translatability indicators and cognitive demand and effort (e.g. O'Brien 2006). Using experimentally controlled source segments to reduce the noise that is inevitable in ecological studies, we also identify source text features that are associated with two categories of MT errors: transfer errors (errors that require the post-editor to refer to the source text) and mechanical errors (errors that can be successfully edited without reference to the source text) (Koby & Champe 2013). Transfer errors are more strongly correlated with cognitive demand (EWR and HTER) and cognitive effort (PWR) than are mechanical errors (Lacruz et al. 2014). We also map linguistically classified errors back to source text features, building on findings of Koponen et al. (2012) and Lacruz et al. (2014). Koponen et al., working with modifications of Temnikova's (2010) taxonomy of MT errors, and Lacruz et al., working with modifications of ATA grading rubrics (Koby & Champe 2013), both found that different linguistic categories of MT error are associated with different levels of cognitive demand and effort.

Bionote:

Isabel Lacruz is Assistant Professor of Translation Studies at Kent State University. She teaches doctoral courses on empirical research methods for translation, and translation and cognition, as well as master level translation practice courses. Lacruz' current research interests include investigation of the mental processes involved in translation and post-editing. She has published theoretical and empirical articles on cognitive aspects of translation and post-editing.

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Pedagogical Approaches to Computer-Assisted Translation Tools
Marileide Dias Esqueda, Federal University of Uberlândia, Brazil
Érika Nogueira de Andrade Stupiello,São Paulo State University, Brazil

Considering the diversified scenario in which technology is being taught in undergraduate level in institutions around the world, with some of them having already fully integrated the teaching of tools to their curriculum, whereas others, facing limitations in personnel and infrastructure, are only beginning to include technology in their courses, this panel proposes to address theoretical and practical perspectives of the use and teaching of translation tools at undergraduate level. The objective of this panel is to bring together those concerned about the impact of technology in training of translators, the gap between academia and the market and the impact of new trends, such as crowdsourcing, in translation training.

For informal enquiries: [marileide_esquedaATileelDOTufuDOTbr]

Marileide Dias Esqueda is a professor at the Federal University of Uberlândia (UFU), where she teaches translation theory and practice in English and Portuguese. She holds a Master's Degree and a Ph.D. in Translation Studies from the State University of Campinas (Unicamp). She is member of the research group Translatio (UFU), sponsored by the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq Brazil). Her research areas are pedagogy of translation, and translation tools. She has published articles in edited volumes and journals.

 

Érika Nogueira de Andrade Stupiello is a professor at the São Paulo State University (Unesp), where she teaches translation practice in English and Portuguese. She holds a Master's Degree and a Ph.D. in Translation Studies from the São Paulo State University (Unesp). She has worked as a sworn translator and interpreter for English and Portuguese since 2000. She is member of the research group Multidisciplinary Approaches on Translation (Multitrad), sponsored by the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq Brazil), and has been developing research on translation tools, translation ethics and localization. She has published and presented her work both in Brazil and abroad.

 

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SESSION PLAN

This panel is not divided into thematic sessions.

PANEL STRUCTURE

INTRODUCTION 20 minutes for – Teaching Translation Technology Tools at Undergraduate Level: Challenges and Perspectives

Érika Nogueira de Andade Stupiello and Marileide Dias Esqueda

PAPER 1 – 20 minutes for presentation + 10 minutes for discussion

Title: Integrating Translation Technologies across the Curriculum: A call for a more critical approach to translation tools

Speaker: Matthieu LeBlanc, Department of Translation and Modern Languages at the Université de Moncton (Moncton, New Brunswick, Canada)

Abstract: While translation technologies are now an integral part of university-based translator-training programs, much of the training on technologies is concentrated in specific courses – or in one specific course – devoted to computer-assisted translation (CAT) tools rather than integrated throughout the curriculum, i.e. in general/specialized translation courses or other more theoretical courses. Some have stressed the importance of integrating tools across the curriculum given their ubiquity in the professional workplace and the considerable changes they have brought about to the translation process. Others have suggested that we need to train translators to become critical users of technologies.

In this paper, I will explore the relationship between translation technology training offered in Canadian universities and the integration of junior translators into the workplace. I will draw on qualitative data collected during a three-month ethnographic survey conducted in three different translation firms and services located in Canada. As part of a larger study focusing on translation technologies and professional satisfaction, junior translators were surveyed, via semi-directed interviews, in order to assess their use of technology in the workplace and the relevance of the training they received in university. Senior translators, who are called upon to supervise the work of junior translators, were also interviewed. Translators were also observed at work, at their workstations in order to obtain a better picture of the nature of the work and the use of CAT tools, among other things.

Data analysis revealed that junior translators were generally satisfied with the technology training they received in university and adapted well to tools they were required to use at work. Senior translators confirmed that juniors were indeed sufficiently tech-savvy and certainly not against the use of tools. That being said, nearly all junior translators were surprised to discover the extent to which their work revolved around certain tools, more specifically translation memory (TM) software. In fact, while they did understand how TMs worked and had used such tools in their translation technologies course or even during their internships, they were not aware of the significant role they play in the overall translation process, in establishing productivity requirements and in limiting their control over the target text. In the end, the majority of junior translators felt that they lacked a certain critical awareness of technologies and of their impact on administrative and business practices.

In this paper, I will look at ways that translator-training programs could better integrate CAT tools throughout the curriculum and, more importantly, help students think more critically about the central role played by translation technologies in the professional world.

Bionote: Dr. Matthieu LeBlanc is an associate professor of translation within the Department of Translation and Modern Languages at the Université de Moncton (Moncton, New Brunswick, Canada). He holds a B.A. in Geography & History, an honors B.Tr. in English-French translation, an M.A. in Translation and a Ph.D. in Sociolinguistics. A former professional translator, Dr. LeBlanc now teaches translation, and conducts research in translation and sociolinguistics. His current research focuses on the translator's status and translation practices in an increasingly automated working environment. He has published in the fields of translation, sociolinguistics and language planning, and presented conferences in several countries.

PAPER 2 – 20 minutes for presentation + 10 minutes for discussion

Titile: Applied Research Projects: bridging the gap between research and practice. A case study in MT evaluation.

Speaker: Sandrine Peraldi, ISIT (Paris-France)

Abstract: This paper aims at describing the implementation and the results of an Applied Research Project in the field of machine translation and post-editing. Applied Research Projects are genuine professional projects commissioned by specific companies or research centers (in specialised translation, communication or terminology management) and carried out by Master students under the supervision of researchers and/or experts of the translation industry. These projects enable our students to gain invaluable professional experience by working closely with those companies and meeting their specific industry needs, while developing many research and technological skills.

More specifically, the analysis presented in this paper was initiated by a translation company specialising in regulated financial information. It consisted in evaluating the efficiency of a combined approach of machine translation (MT) and computer-assisted translation (CAT) tools in the financial field. Translation companies specialising in finance are indeed often required to translate extremely high volumes of texts at very short notice, while providing high quality translations to be approved by regulatory authorities. They are thus compelled to streamline as much as possible the translating process, while reducing the number of translators working on the same document as it can affect its quality and its terminological and stylistic coherence.

Despite recent and significant advances in MT (due in particular to the use of hybrid engines that combine linguistic and statistic approaches), computer systems, depending on the domain and the type of texts to be processed, still give rise to relatively poor quality translations, that require an uneconomically large amount of post-editing efforts. On the one hand, the syntactic complexity and the terminological density of the financial field can result in a large number of non-sense phrases, misinterpretations as well as stylistic missteps within the target translation that usually cannot be dealt with through a modification of the syntactic rules or the integrated dictionaries. On the other hand, the high degree of redundancy that characterizes those documents makes CAT tools particularly suitable for integrating machine translation to translation memories. Therefore, our objective was to determine whether the combination of machine translation and computer-assisted tools could offer a credible alternative to human translation from a qualitative and economical perspective.

A three-step methodology was thus implemented. Two different corpora consisting of financial and legal texts were first translated using a specific CAT/MT tool. Secondly, a typology of errors was built by classifying and analyzing the translation segments generated. Finally, this hybrid method was evaluated in terms of time, money savings and quality as compared to human translation. Special attention was paid to the influence of the MT on the post-editor translation choices, during the proofreading stage.

We therefore propose to describe in this paper the different processing steps of our analysis and the final results of this research project, while highlighting the many advantages of such pedagogical projects that enable to gear research and professionalization among Master students.

Bionote: Research Director at ISIT, Sandrine Peraldi holds a PhD in Terminology and Corpus Linguistics (University Paris Diderot). Dr. Peraldi has been in charge of Research projects and European Projects at ISIT since 2006. She lectures in Terminology, Corpus Linguistics, CAT tools and Machine translation. She also supervises Masters research dissertations. As a member of the CRATIL and the CLILLAC-ARP (Paris 7) research centres, she has published more than 30 research articles in the field of onto-terminology, discourse analysis, semantics and machine translation. She is Editor in chief of the Bulletin du CRATIL, the scientific journal of ISIT's research centre.

PAPER 4 – 20 minutes for presentation + 10 minutes for discussion

Title: Exploring the Pedagogical Potential and Challenges of Interactive Translation Dictation

Speaker: Julián Zapata, University of Ottawa (Ottawa, Canada)

Abstract: Our presentation will explore interactive translation dictation (ITD) from a pedagogical viewpoint. ITD is defined as a translation technique that involves mainly voice interaction with multimodal interfaces (MIs) equipped with voice recognition (VR) technology, throughout the entire translation process, namely during preparation, production and revision. Examples of commercially available MIs include smartphones, tablets and touchscreen computers, which are primarily voice- and touch-enabled.

VR is a technological application that gives a machine the ability to recognize and process human voice and speech. Research on VR technology dates back to the early stages of computing in the mid-20th century. Today, after decades of research and development in the field, VR systems are available in several major languages and widely used in a variety of applications, not only for obtaining automatic transcriptions of speech, but also for issuing voice commands to the operating systems in desktop computers and MIs. This technology has the potential to become one of the most efficient, cost-effective and ergonomic applications in the near future for translation professionals, but significant technical and pedagogical challenges still need to be addressed.

In this presentation, we will first provide an overview of the evolution of VR technology and the extent to which it has been explored and used in translation practice and teaching. Secondly, some of the current challenges and limitations of this technology will be described while lending support to the idea of integrating sight translation, translation dictation and VR courses to translator training programs as a partial solution to the challenges. Indeed, as the technology improves, universities play an increasingly crucial role in efficiently integrating VR technology to the translator's toolbox. However, in this integration, translators will have to learn to dictate efficiently; they will have to adopt entirely new translation techniques. To wrap up our presentation, we will present and discuss, from a pedagogical perspective, the preliminary results of an empirical study on ITD carried out within the framework of our doctorate in translation studies (in progress), and will outline avenues for future research.

Bionote: Julián Zapata holds an Honours B.A. in English-French-Spanish translation and a M.A. in translation studies from the University of Ottawa, where he is currently pursuing his doctoral degree. His research interests include multimodal interaction, speech technologies, translation dictation and translation technologies. He is also a professor of translation (English-Spanish) and a teacher and research assistant in translation technology, and has collaborated in a number of projects related particularly to computer-aided translation tools and translator training.

PAPER 4 – 20 minutes for presentation + 10 minutes for discussion

Title: 'Locating' Mobile Localisation into the Translator Training Curriculum

Speaker 1: María del Mar Sánchez Ramos, University of Alcalá (Alcalá de Henares, Madrid, Spain)

Sepaker 2: Lucía Morado Vázquez, Department of Translation Technology at the Faculty of Translation and Interpretation, University of Geneva (Geneva, Switzerland)

Abstract: In the last years, the localisation industry has become a growing market as a means of digital communication, where localisation is defined as the linguistic and cultural adaptation of digital content to the requirements of a specific market or 'locale'. This professional area offers a wide range of possibilities for translators as translation is an essential part of the localisation process. Nevertheless, our undergraduates need technical expertise in order to fulfil the localisation requirements. Teaching localisation implies applying learning methodologies based upon a conceptual and procedural knowledge so that students can acquire a sufficient number of technical capabilities and competences and to prepare them for the current localisation market place. In terms of products to be localised, such as webpages, software programs or videogames, mobile localisation is emerging as a new area and a new market for translators interested in developing more technical skills and become part of the localisation industry. Mobile localisation has its own technical and cultural implications and it can be considered an isolated area of study. Based upon a theoretical and practical approach carried out at the University of Alcalá (Spain) and University of Geneva (Switzerland), we will describe how we have implemented an effective methodology to teach mobile localisation. We will also discuss the main constraints that this specific localisation area entails: the choice of mobile operating system to be used in our labs and tutorials (ios, android, windows phone...) as each of them can imply different teaching procedures and technical implications; the minimalist nature of mobile applications and the specific language that they use; and the difficulty of obtaining real devices to test our localised applications and the current alternative solutions, such as the use of emulators, which are not always able to replicate all the possible case scenarios (e.g. the use of the accelerometer). Finally, we will explain how Computer-Assisted Translation tools can be adapted to train our students on this particular field and how we have made use of their advanced features in our lessons: such as the creation of ad hoc filters for the recognition of translatable text within the source code of a mobile application.

Bionote Speaker 1: María del Mar Sánchez Ramos is a Lecturer in Translation Studies at the University of Alcalá (Madrid, Spain). She studied at the University of Granada (Spain) and received her Ph.D. in Translation Studies from Universitat Jaume I (Castellon, Spain). She completed her post-doctoral studies on Corpus-based Translation Studies at Centre for Translation and Textual Studies, Dublin City University, Ireland. Her main areas of interest are translator training, corpus-based translation studies, localisation and translation technology. Her research has been developed within different national and international projects (ECPC, GEA, AGORA, FITISPOS).

Bionote Speaker 2: Lucía Morado Vázquez is a researcher and lecturer at the Department of Translation Technology at the Faculty of Translation and Interpretation, University of Geneva, Switzerland, on the areas of localisation, computer-assisted translation tools and information technology. She holds a PhD in localisation at the Localisation Research Centre, at the University of Limerick, Ireland. She holds a BA in translation and interpreting at University of Salamanca, Spain. She has been a voting member of the XLIFF Technical Committee and the XLIFF Promotion and Liaison Subcommittee since its establishment. Her research interests are standards of localisation, localisation training and translation memories' metadata.

PAPER 5 – 20 minutes for presentation + 10 minutes for discussion

Title: Translation Technologies: Promises and Challenges for a Less Commonly Taught Language

Speaker: Mehmet Şahin, Department of Translation and Interpretation, Bilkent University (Ankara, Turkey)

Abstract: Computer-assisted translation (CAT) tools and machine translation (MT) systems are becoming ubiquitous for commonly spoken and taught languages such as English, German, French, and Spanish. Technological competence is already included in the EMT (European Master's in Translation) model of translation competence and it is a required skill for translators and interpreters seeking positions in European institutions. Turkish language, although spoken by a large number of people in the Euro-Asian region, has been a less-commonly taught language in the world and received less attention in terms of CAT tools and MT studies. Despite the imbalance in regard to variety and quality of CAT tools and MT and to volume of studies between commonly taught and spoken languages and Turkish language, the volume of translations is growing each day and turn-around time for translation tasks is becoming less and less for both in a parallel manner. Recent surveys show that there is not much consistency in terms of technology use in translation departments in universities and in translation companies in Turkey. Similarly, not all translation departments have a faculty member to teach translation technologies because most of them come from various related fields such as literary studies, linguistics, and education. Even most graduates of translation studies are not fully competent in technology partly because it is an emerging field within translation studies and partly because of lack of interest. On the other hand, translation students and novice translators show a high level of interest in technology courses and eagerness in integrating technology in their work. All of these factors pose a big challenge for translator trainers, translators, and translation companies. How should we teach technology? What should be required from candidate translators in terms of skills and competence? Can we reach a consistency in terms of required competences? Which components of technology should be included in the translation curriculum? How can awareness and research in translation technologies be promoted among scholars? What is the future of CAT tools and MT in Turkey? This study will try to find answers to these questions through documentary research, surveys to translations students and instructors/scholars and to translation companies.

Bionotes: Mehmet Şahin completed his undergraduate studies in the Department of Translation and Interpretation at Bilkent University where he also received his master's degree in Teacher Education. He pursued his doctoral studies in Curriculum and Instruction with a minor in MA in Applied Linguistics/TESOL at Iowa State University. His research studies during his doctoral studies were mainly on computer-assisted language learning and language technologies. Mehmet Şahin is working as an assistant professor of translation and interpretation at Izmir University of Economics since 2008 and his research interests include translation studies, translation and interpreting technologies, machine translation and translator and interpreter training.

WRAP-UP SECTION – 20 minutes

Overviewing the proposals and fostering new ideas to contribute towards the integration of technologies in the translator's training

Érika Nogueira de Andrade Stupiello – Unesp Campus of São José do Rio Preto SP

Marileide Dias Esqueda – Universidade Federal de Uberlândia MG

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New Perspectives on Cohesion and Coherence: Implications for Translation
Kerstin Kunz, University of Heidelberg, Germany
Ekaterina Lapshinova-Koltunski, Saarland University, Germany
Katrin Menzel, Saarland University, Germany

The panel will investigate textual relations of cohesion and coherence in translation and multilingual text production with a strong focus on innovative methods of empirical analysis, as well as technology and computation. Given the amount of multilingual computation that is taking place, this topic is important for both human and machine translation, and further multilingual studies. Cohesion refers to the text-internal relationship of linguistic elements that are overtly linked via lexical and grammatical devices across sentence boundaries to be understood as a text. The recognition of coherence in a text is more subjective as it involves text- and reader-based features and refers to the logical flow of interrelated ideas in a text, thus establishing a mental textual world. There is a connection between these two concepts in that relations of cohesion can be regarded as explicit indicators of meaning relations in a text and, hence, contribute to its overall coherence.

The aim of this panel is to bring together scholars analyzing cohesion and coherence from different research perspectives that cover translation-relevant topics: language contrast, translationese and machine translation. What these approaches share is that they investigate instantiations of discourse phenomena in a multilingual context. And moreover, language comparison is based on empirical data. The challenges here can be identified with respect to the following methodological questions:

1. How to arrive at a cost-effective operationalization of the annotation process when dealing with a broader range of discourse phenomena?

2. Which statistical techniques are needed and are adequate for the analysis? And which methods can be combined for data interpretation?

3. Which applications of the knowledge acquired are possible in multilingual computation, especially in machine translation?

The contributions of different research groups involved in our panel reflect these questions. On the one hand, some contributions will concentrate on procedures to analyse cohesion and coherence from a corpus-linguistic perspective (M. Rysová, K. Rysová). On the other hand, our panel will include papers with a particular focus on textual cohesion in parallel corpora that include both originals and translated texts (K. Kerremans, K. Kunz/ E. Lapshinova-Koltunski/ S. Degaetano-Ortlieb, A. Kutuzov/M. Kunilovskayath). And finally, the papers in the panel will also include discussion of the nature of cohesion and coherence with implications for human and machine translation (E. Lapshinova-Koltunski, C. Scarton/ L. Specia, K. S. Smith/L. Specia).

Targeting the questions raised above and addressing them together from different research angles, the present panel will contribute to moving empirical translation studies ahead.

For informal enquiries: [eDOTlapshinovaATmxDOTuni-saarlandDOTde]

Kerstin Kunz (University of Heidelberg) holds an interim professorship at the Institute of Translation and Interpreting. She finished her PhD on Nominal Coreference in English and German in 2009. Since then, she has been involved in empirical research projects dealing with properties of translations and English-German contrasts on the level of lexicogrammar and discourse. Together with Erich Steiner, she currently has GECCo project (http://www.gecco.uni-saarland.de/GECCo/Home.html) at the Department of Applied Linguistics, Translation and Interpreting (Saarland University), in which different types of cohesive relations in English and German are explored, contrasting languages, originals and translations as well as written and spoken registers.

Ekaterina Lapshinova-Koltunski (Saarland University) is a post-doctoral researcher at the Department of Applied Linguistics, Translation and Interpreting. She finished her PhD on semi-automatic extraction and classification of language data at Institute for Natural Language Processing (Stuttgart) in 2010. Since then, she has been working in corpus-based projects related to language variation, language contrasts and translation, one of which is GECCo (http://www.gecco.uni-saarland.de/GECCo/Home.html). In 2012 she received a start-up research grant from the Saarland University to build resources for the analysis on variation in translation caused by different dimensions (register, translation method) resulting in translation varieties (including both human and machine translation).

Katrin Menzel (Saarland University) studied Conference Interpreting and Translation Studies at Saarland University (Saarbrücken, Germany). She has been working as a teaching and research staff member at the Department of Applied Linguistics, Translation 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.

 

 

 

SESSION PLAN

Each paper is allocated with a 20 minutes time slot + 10 minutes discussion.

Discussion time is used at the end of each paper.

Introduction (20 Minutes)

PART 1 : TEXTUAL COHESION AND CONTRASTIVE ASPECTS 

PAPER 1:

Title: Terminological variation in multilingual parallel corpora: a semi-automatic method involving co-referential analysis

Speaker: Koen Kerremans, Vrije Universiteit Brussel (Belgium)

PAPER 2:

Title: Cohesive chains in an English-German parallel corpus: Methodologies and challenges

Speaker: Kerstin Kunz, University of Heidelberg (Germany); Ekaterina Lapshinova-Koltunski, Saarland University (Germany) and Stefania Degaetano-Ortlieb, Saarland University (Germany)

PART 2: ASPECTS OF COHESION AND COHERENCE IN HUMAN VS MACHINE TRANSLATION

PAPER 3:

Title: Cohesion and Translation Variation: Corpus-based Analysis of Translation Varieties

Speaker: Ekaterina Lapshinova-Koltunski, Saarland University (Germany)

PAPER 4:

Title: Exploring Discourse in Machine Translation Quality Estimation

Speaker: Carolina Scarton, University of Sheffield (UK) and Lucia Specia, University of Sheffield (UK)

PAPER 5:

Title: Examining Lexical Coherence in a Multilingual Setting

Speaker: Karin Sim Smith, University of Sheffield (UK) and Lucia Specia (University of Sheffield)

 

PAPER TITLES, ABSTRACTS AND BIONOTES

PART 1 : TEXTUAL COHESION AND CONTRASTIVE ASPECTS

PAPER 1

Title: Terminological variation in multilingual parallel corpora: a semi-automatic method involving co-referential analysis

Speaker: Koen Kerremans, Vrije Universiteit Brussel (Belgium)

Abstract: The work presented in this article is part of a research study that focused on how terms and equivalents recorded in multilingual terminological databases can be extended with terminological variants and their translations retrieved from English source texts and their corresponding French and Dutch target texts (Kerremans 2014). For this purpose, a novel type of translation resource is proposed, resulting from a method for identifying terminological variants and their translations in texts. In many terminology approaches, terminological variants within and across languages are identified on the basis of semantic and/or linguistic criteria (Carreño Cruz 2008; Fernández-Silva et al. 2008). Contrary to such approaches, three perspectives of analysis were combined in Kerremans (2014) in order to build up the translation resource comprised of terminological variants and their translations. The first perspective is the semantic perspective, which means that units of specialised knowledge – or units of understanding (Temmerman 2000) – form the starting point for the analysis of term variation in the English source texts. The second perspective of analysis is the textual perspective, which implies that terminological variants pointing to a particular unit of understanding in a text are identified on the basis of their 'co-referential ties'. In the third perspective of analysis, which is the contrastive perspective, the French and Dutch translations of the English terms are extracted from the target texts. This approach is motivated by the fact that translators need to acquire a profound insight into the unit of understanding expressed in a source text before they can decide which equivalent to choose in the target language. In the framework of text linguistics, it has been shown how this can be achieved through the analysis of texts. A translator analyses the unit of understanding based on how it is expressed in the source texts (i.e. the semantic perspective), how its meaning is developed through the use of cohesive ties (i.e. the textual perspective) and how it can be rendered into the target language (i.e. the contrastive perspective). In this article, we shall only focus on how co-referential analysis was applied to the analysis of terminological variants in the source texts, resulting in lexical chains. These are "cohesive ties sharing the same referent, lexically rather than grammatically expressed" (Rogers 2007: 17). The terminological variants in these chains – which in this study were limited to only single word nouns or nominal expressions – become part of a general cluster of variants that were encountered in a collection of source texts. Several semi-automated modules were created in order to reduce the manual effort in the analysis of co-referential chains while ensuring consistency and completeness in the data. We will explain how the semi-automatic modules work and how these contribute to the development of the envisaged translation resource (cf. supra). We will also discuss what results can be derived from a co-referential analysis of terms and how these results can be used to quantitatively and qualitatively compare term variation between source and target texts.

Bionote: Koen Kerremans obtained his Master's degree in Germanic Philology at Universiteit Antwerpen in 2001, his Master's degree in Language Sciences - with a major in computational linguistics - at Universiteit Gent in 2002 and his PhD degree in Applied Linguistics at Vrije Universiteit Brussel in 2014. His research interests pertain to applied linguistics, language technologies, ontologies, specialised communication, terminology (variation) and translation studies. He is currently appointed as doctor-assistant at the department of Applied Linguistics (Faculty of Arts and Philosophy) of Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB) where he teaches courses on applied linguistics, terminology and culture-specific communication.

PAPER 2:

Title: Cohesive chains in an English-German parallel corpus: Methodologies and challenges

Speaker: Kerstin Kunz, University of Heidelberg (Germany); Ekaterina Lapshinova-Koltunski, Saarland University (Germany) and Stefania Degaetano-Ortlieb, Saarland University (Germany)

Abstract: The current paper discusses methodological challenges in analyzing cohesive relations with corpus-based procedures. It is based on research aiming at the comparison of English and German cohesion in written and spoken language and in originals and translations. For this objective, methodologies are developed that enable a fine-grained and precise analysis of different cohesive aspects in a representative corpus and that yield results for data interpretation within the duration of the project. Thus, methodologies have to be elaborate and cost effective at the same time.

We use an English-German comparable and parallel corpus which is pre-annotated on various grammatical levels and which has been enriched semi-automatically with information on cohesive devices of reference, conjunction, substitution and ellipsis. Our discussion will revolve around methodological challenges related to the current analysis of (1) co-reference and (2) lexical cohesion. The analysis of both types includes (a) identifying cohesive devices that function as explicit linguistic triggers (b) setting up a relation to the linguistic items with which they tie up (antecedents) and (c) integrating these ties into (longer) cohesive chains.

The methodological steps involved are the following:

1) Designing an annotation scheme. Main challenges revolve around the conceptual distinction of relations between instantiated co-reference and sense relations (lexical cohesion), the definition of categories that fit for a bilingual analysis, the inter-relatedness of chains, the depth of the ontological hierarchy and the distance between chain elements.

2) Designing semi-automatic annotation procedures. The challenge is to combine automatic pre-annotation and manual revision in a cost effective way. Our annotation of co-reference is based on the automatic extraction of reference devices, their manual revision and the manual annotation of chain relations (outputs of automatic co-reference tools were to error-prone for pre-annotation of coreference chains). For the annotation of lexical cohesion, we intend to proceed in a similar way. Sense relations and chains are pre-annotated using existing resources, e.g. WordNet, and revised by human annotators to obtain most precise results.

3) Extracting and analysing information. The challenge here is to extract data relevant for our research objective, i.e. information on chain length, distance between elements in chains in combination with morpho-syntactic preferences of chain elements, as well as on alignment of translational equivalents of cohesive relations. Moreover, appropriate statistical evaluation techniques have to be applied for interpretations in terms of language contrast and properties of translation. After demonstrating these methodologies on the basis of initial results, the presentation will end with a discussion of open questions. While our main aim is to design methodologies for a contrastive comparison of English and German on the level of text/ discourse, we hope to lay the ground for new paths in NLP and in machine translation, in particular. Furthermore, available alignments provide an insight into shifts in cohesion between source and target texts and the translation strategies applied.

Bionote: Kerstin Kunz holds an interim professorship at the Institute of Translation and Interpreting at Heidelberg University where she teaches in several BA and MA programs. She finished her PhD on English-German Nominal Coreference in 2009. She has been involved in various empirical research projects on properties of translations and English German contrasts on the level of lexicogrammar and discourse. Together with Erich Steiner, she currently has a corpus-based project at Saarland University. The GECCo project explores different types of cohesive relations in English and German, contrasting languages, originals and translations as well as written and spoken registers.

 

PART 3: Aspects of Cohesion and Coherence in Human vs. Machine Translation

PAPER 3:

Title: Cohesion and Translation Variation: Corpus-based Analysis of Translation Varieties

Speaker: Ekaterina Lapshinova-Koltunski, Saarland University (Germany)

Abstract: In this study, we analyse cohesion in 'translation varieties' - translation types or classes which differ in the translation methods or knowledge involved, e.g. human vs. machine translation (MT) or professional vs. novice. We expect variation in the distribution of different cohesive devices which occur in translations. Variation in translation can be caused by different factors, e.g. by systemic contrasts between source and target languages or different register settings, as well as ambiguities in both source and target languages. Thus, conjunction 'while' in the original sentence in (1a) is ambiguous between the readings 'during' and 'although'. The ambiguity is solved in (1b), but not in (1c), as the German 'während' is also ambiguous: (1a) My father preferred to stay in a bathrobe and be waited on for a change while he lead the stacks of newspapers [...] (1b) Mein Vater ist lieber im Bademantel geblieben und hat sich zur Abwechslung mal bedienen lassen und dabei die Zeitungsstapel durchgelesen [...] (1c) Mein Vater saß die ganze Zeit im Bademantel da und ließ sich zur Abwechslung bedienen, während er die Zeitungen laß [...]

English translations from German are less distinct and less register-dependent if compared to German translations from English. The variation in English-to-German translations strongly depends on register and devices of cohesion involved reflecting either shining-through or normalisation phenomena. Therefore, for our analysis, we chose a corpus of English-to-German translation varieties containing five subcorpora: translations 1) by professionals, 2) by students, 3) with a rule-based MT system, 4) with a statistical MT system trained with big data, 5) with a statistical MT system trained with small data.

Our first observations show that translation varieties differ in the distribution of cohesive devices. For example, novice translations contain more personal reference than the other translation, e.g. professional translators or a rule-based MT. Moreover, registers also differ in their preferences for cohesive devices, e.g. popular-science and instructions use the conjunctions während and dabei equally in German original texts. But tourism and political essays make more use of während than dabei. In professional translations, we observe the same tendency. In student translations, however, während is overused in most cases. The same tendency is observed for MT, where dabei sometimes does not occur at all.

So, we want to prove how cohesive devices reflect translation methods, the evidence of 'experience' (professional vs. novice or big data vs. small data), as well as registers involved in translation varieties under analysis. For this, we extract evidence for cohesive devices from the corpus and analyse the extracted methods with statistical techniques, applying unsupervised analysis to where the differences lie, and supervised techniques to find the features contributing to these differences. This knowledge is useful for both human translation and MT, e.g. in evaluation and MT improvement.

Bionote: Ekaterina Lapshinova-Koltunski (Saarland University) is a post-doctoral researcher at the Department of Applied Linguistics, Translation and Interpreting. She finished her PhD on semi-automatic extraction and classification of language data at Institute for Natural Language Processing (Stuttgart) in 2010. Since then, she has been working in corpus-based projects related to language variation, language contrasts and translation, one of which is GECCo (http://www.gecco.uni-saarland.de/GECCo/Home.html). In 2012 she received a start-up research grant from the Saarland University to build resources for the analysis on variation in translation caused by different dimensions (register, translation method) resulting in translation varieties (including both human and machine translation).

PAPER 4:

Title: Exploring Discourse in Machine Translation Quality Estimation

Speaker: Carolina Scarton, University of Sheffield (UK) and Lucia Specia, University of Sheffield (UK)

Abstract: Discourse covers linguistic phenomena that can go beyond sentence boundaries and are related to text cohesion and coherence. Suitable elementary discourse units (EDUs) are defined depending on the level of analysis (paragraphs, sentences or clauses). Cohesion can be defined as a phenomenon where EDUs are connected using linguistics markers (e.g.: connectives). Coherence is related to the topic of the text and to the logical relationships among EDUs (e.g.: causality). A few recent efforts have been made towards including discourse information into machine translation (MT) systems and MT evaluation metrics. In our work, we address quality estimation (QE) of MT. This challenging task focuses on evaluating translation quality without relying on human references. Features extracted from examples of source and translation texts, as well as the MT system, are used to train machine learning algorithms in order to predict the quality of new, unseen translations.

The motivation for using discourse information for QE is threefold: (i) on the source side: identifying discourse structures (such as, connectives) or patterns of structures which are more complex to be translated, and therefore will most likely lead to low quality translations; (ii) on the target side: identifying broken or incomplete discourse structures, which are more likely to be found in low quality translations; (iii) comparing discourse structures on both source and target sides to identify not only possible errors, but also language peculiarities which are not appropriately handled by the MT system.

Since discourse phenomena can happen at document-level, we moved from the traditional sentence-level QE to document-level QE. Document-level QE is useful, for example, for evaluation in gisting scenarios, where the quality of the document as a whole is important so that the end-user can make sense of it. We have explored lexical cohesion for QE at document-level for English-Portuguese, Spanish-English and English-Spanish translations in two ways: (i) considering repetitions of words, lemmas and nouns, in both source and target texts; (ii) considering Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) cohesion. LSA is a method that can capture cohesive relations in a text, going beyond simple repetition counts. In our scenario, for each sentence, there is a word vector that represents it, considering all the words that appear in the document. Sentences are then compared based on their words vectors and sentences showing high similarity with most others are considered cohesive. Since LSA is language independent, it was applied on target and source texts. LSA cohesion features improved the results over a strong baseline.

Our next step is to move to the Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST) to capture coherence phenomena. On the source side, RST trees will be extracted and we will correlate the occurrence (or not) of the discourse structures (e.g.: Nucleous, Satellite or relations type, such as Attribution) with the quality labels. The same will be applied on the target side, where incorrect discourse units are expected to correlate better with low quality translations.

Bionote: Carolina Scarton is a PhD candidate and Marie Curie Early Stage Researcher (EXPERT project) at The University of Sheffield, working in the Natural Language Processing group on the Department of Computer Science, under supervision of Dr. Lucia Specia. Her research focuses on the use of discursive information for quality estimation of machine translations. She received a master's degree from University of São Paulo, Brazil, in 2013, where she worked at the Interinstitutional Center for Computational Linguistics (NILC).

PAPER 5:

Title: Examining Lexical Coherence in a Multilingual Setting

Speaker: Karin Sim Smith, University of Sheffield (UK) and Lucia Specia (University of Sheffield)

Abstract: Discourse has long been recognised as a crucial part of translation, but when it comes to Statistical Machine Translation (SMT), discourse information has been mostly neglected to date, as the decoders in SMT tend to work on a sentence by sentence basis. Our research concerns a study of lexical coherence, an issue that has not yet been exploited in the context of SMT. We explore an entity-based discourse framework, applying it for the first time in a multilingual context, aiming to: (i) examine whether human- authored texts offer different patterns of entities compared to (potentially incorrect) machine translated texts, and a version of the latter fixed by humans, and (ii) understand how this discourse phenomenon is realised across languages.

Entity distribution patterns are derived from entity grids or entity graphs. Entity grids are constructed by identifying the discourse entities in the documents under consideration, and constructing a 2D grids whereby each column corresponds to the entity, i.e. noun, being tracked, and each row represents a particular sentence in the document. Alternatively these can be projected on a bipartite graph where the sentences and entities form nodes, and the connections are the edges.

For the monolingual experiments, we use a corpus comprising three versions of the same documents: the human translation, the raw machine translation output and the post-edited version of the machine translation output, establishing whether any differences in lexical coherence may be due to the nature of the texts, as well as to potential errors in the machine translated version. We observed some trends in our monolingual comparative experiments on versions of translations, indicating that some patterns of differences between human translated and machine translated texts can be expected. We also applied the entity-based grid framework in a multilingual context, to parallel texts in English, French, and German. The goals are to understand differences in lexical coherence across languages, and in the future to establish whether this can be used as a means of ensuring that the same level of lexical coherence is transferred from the source to the machine translated documents.

We observed distinct patterns in our comparative multilingual approach: we discovered that the probabilities for different types of entity transitions varied, indicating a different coherence structure in the different languages. In this instance we are comparing the same texts, on a document by document basis, so the same genre and style, yet there is a clear and consistent difference in the probabilities. This would appear to indicate, amongst other things, that the manner in which lexical coherence is achieved varies from language to language. Besides establishing the worth of these features independently, we will also do so in the context of MT evaluation, and our ultimate goal is to then integrate them in an SMT model, in the hope that they will manage to exert influence in the decoding process and improve overall text coherence.

Bionote: Karin Sim Smith is currently in her 2nd year PhD at the Computer Science Department of Sheffield University, where she is part of the Modist project (Modelling Discourse in Machine Translation), which aims to improve discourse in Machine Translation. Specifically, she is researching ways to improve the coherence of SMT output, hoping to learn the coherence patterns that can be transferred from source to target text.

WRAP-UP SESSION (20 Minutes)

 

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