Marianne Lederer

Université Paris 3 – Sorbonne Nouvelle, France

Developmental psychology (Piaget (1967), psycholinguistics (Levelt and Flores d’Arcais 1978, Van Dijk and Kintsch 1983, Kertesz 1988, Pinker 1994), and more recently cognitive science (Hofstadter and Sander 2013, Dehaene 2013) studied cognition and more specifically comprehension in general communication. They showed that comprehension implies not only language but also extralinguistic knowledge on the part of both parties to communication.

As to translation, the facts that on the one hand, languages are not isomorphic and, on the other, that language is only the explicit part of what is being communicated (Sperber and Wilson 1986) explain why translation cannot be reduced to transcoding but must resort to creativity to achieve its aim.

The Interpretive Theory of Translation (IT) was the very first to turn away, end of the 1960s, from linguistics towards cognition, i.e. what is taking place in the heads of interpreters and translators. Its founder, Danica Seleskovitch, based on her experience in conference interpreting and on the above-mentioned findings, added one step to the process of translation: deverbalization, which induces creativity and allows for a reformulation based on creative sense equivalents. Evidence from research (Seleskovitch 1975, Lederer 1981) confirmed that successful interpreting followed this pattern, which was later shown to be applicable to written translation (Delisle 1980, Israël 1990, Chesterman 2002).

IT’s controversial postulate of deverbalization is supported not only by writers (Valéry 1965, Sartre 1991) but also by neuropsychological research on aphasia and brain damage (Barbizet 1968, Laplane 1997): translators and interpreters, taking only into account the notional and emotional effects produced by the original wording, reformulate sense into a creative idiomatic wording in the target language.
This paper will try to show the bridge that the interpretive approach is building between cognitive research and creative practice.

Keywords:
Comprehension, deverbalisation, reformulation

Author bio:

Marianne Lederer worked for 25 years as a free-lance conference interpreter. After a ‘Doctorat d’Etat’, she joined the university and taught at the Ecole Supérieure d’Interprètes et de Traducteurs (Paris 3). She was head of the School from 1990 to 1999.
She co-founded the Interpretive Theory of Translation with Danica Seleskovitch. She has numerous publications and two of her books were translated into English (A Systematic Approach to Teaching Interpretation, 1995 and Translation - The Interpretive Model,2003).

Shilan Shafiei

University of Isfahan, Iran

The present study investigates the effectiveness of applying drama techniques on the interpreter trainees’ emotional intelligence and their performance quality in consecutive interpreting. A quasi-experimental design was utilized in the study. The participants were 50 students who studied English translation at B.A level in two universities in Iran. A test of consecutive interpreting and a Bar-On Emotional Quotient Inventory were administered to both experimental and control group. Then, the experimental group received a ten-week treatment i.e., teaching interpreting integrated with drama techniques. Post-tests were run after a three-month interval in both experimental and control group. The independent sample T-test and Pearson correlation coefficient were utilized to analyse the obtained data. Results indicated that the participants in the experimental group showed a great improvement in both performance quality of consecutive interpreting and the level of emotional intelligence. The results of the study have some implications for interpreting instructors; they may apply the techniques used in the study to help the trainees improve their performance quality and manage their anxiety in inter-lingual interactions.

Keywords: Interpreting, emotional intelligence, performance quality

Author bio:

Shilan Shafiei is a PhD candidate at the University of Isfahan in Iran. She got her M.A in translation studies from the same university and her B.A in English Literature from Tehran Kharazmi University. Her research interests includes: translation and ideology, translation and discourse analysis, translation and psychology, and interpreting teaching and assessment. She was selected as the distinguished researcher in the translation studies field in 2017 in Iran. Her PhD Dissertation was on the teaching and assessment in consecutive interpreting in academic setting. In her dissertation, she worked on consecutive interpreting techniques and developed a local assessment rubric for interpreting assessment.

Vicent Montalt & Isabel Garcia-Izquierdo

Jaume I University, Castelló, Spain

Patientcentredness is becoming a widespread paradigm of health care systems in many industrialised countries. Patient-centred care involves crucial shifts regarding the doctor-patient relationship, in which individual patients’ needs, backgrounds and preferences take centre stage. PCC’s ultimate aim is to empower patients so that they can take a more active role in their interactions with health professionals, in the co-management of their therapeutic process, in shared-decision making, and in continuing education. PPC also involves deep changes in the way knowledge is constructed and shared among and across the different communities of stakeholders involved in healthcare – nurses, doctors, patients, patients’ relatives, general public, managers, policy makers, translators, interpreters, etc. However, doctor-centred approaches to clinical communication still prevail in many contexts and situations. In the framework of this new paradigm of PCC, we are interested in understanding how health professionals view their – ideal and real – relationship with patients from the point of view of multilingual and multicultural communication, and how they create narratives that advocate or question – or even reject – patient-centred communication. Health professional narratives are a kind of life narrative embedded in the clinical settings where those professionals carry out their professions. Through qualitative interviewing (Edwards and Holland 2013) we have explored the way four different health professionals (three doctors and a nurse) perceive communication and translation in their own clinical contexts. We have used in-depth, semi-structured interviews in which questions were open-ended and non-directed. The interviews were carried out in a conversational and naturalistic way in the working settings of each of the interviewees. One of our provisional conclusions is that professional narratives may vary across different medical specialties and according to personal ethos. We can also observe some divergences in the perception of communication and translation worth studying further. In addition, according to our initial qualitative data health professional narratives differ from patient narratives in that the later ones tend to be more personal whereas the former ones are more focused on expertise and expert systems.

Keywords: Translation, personal narratives, patient-centred care

Author bio:

Vicent Montalt (Jaume I University, Castelló, Spain). He teaches medical, scientific and technical translation at Jaume I University. He is the Director of the Master’s Programme in Medical Translation, and leads the research group TradMed that works on medical translation. He is a member of the research group GENTT (Textual Genres for Translation) and of the IULMA (Instituto Interuniversitario de Lenguas Modernas Aplicadas). He is the author of Manual de traducció científicotècnica (2005) and co-author of Medical translation step by step. Learning by drafting (2007).

Isabel Garcia-Izquierdo (Jaume I University, Castelló, Spain). Full professor. She teaches discourse analysis and applied linguistics for translation purposes at Jaume I University. She is the director of the research group GENTT (Textual Genres for Translation). She is also member of the IULMA (Instituto Interuniversitario de Lenguas Modernas Aplicadas). She has published widely in the fields of applied linguistics and translation studies, in particular in expert-to-lay translation and communication in healthcare settings. 

Ana Muñoz-Miquel

Jaume I University, Castelló, Spain

Translators and interpreters tasks are increasingly automated and routinized thanks to advances in technology. In the medical translation field, this automation has been particularly evident when dealing with highly specialized texts addressed at experts, in which concepts such as accuracy, standardization or exact equivalence are of paramount importance. 

There is, however, an area where there is no room for automation: that related to doctor-patient communication and patient-centered care. Patient-centered communication ensures that patients' needs and expectations, as well as their social, cultural and emotional perspectives are taken into account (Rivadeneyra et al 2000; Arrighi et al 2010). This communication paradigm often requires “non-standardized, adapted, contextualized [translation and interpreting] solutions [to] achiev[e] full comprehensibility, empathy, empowerment and well-being of patients” (Montalt 2017). This fact clearly influences translators’ tasks and skills, as they not only have to help bridge linguistic and cultural barriers, but also to deal with emotional and cognitive asymmetries between doctors and patients.
Based on these assumptions, this paper presents the results of two research projects carried out by the Gentt Group (Universitat Jaume I, Spain) in which qualitative methods (interviews, focus groups and role-plays with real actors) where used to explore the “terminological, stylistic, textual and pragmatic means as well as […] non-verbal resources” (Montalt 2017) that are needed to face the challenges that patient-centered communication poses, both in the written and oral forms. The results show that when translating texts for patients, strategies such as using determinologization procedures, making tenor adjustments or adding/omitting information are required. In oral interactions during medical consultations, tailoring information to patients’ expectations, avoiding threating words, emphasizing the positive or using reassuring strategies proved to be useful. The importance of getting feedback from real patients and the possible application of these results to improve health professionals’ communications skills with patients are also discussed.

References

Arrighi, E. et al. (2010): “El valor terapéutico en oncología. La perspectiva de pacientes, familiares y profesionales.” Psicooncología 7(2–3): 363–374.
Rivadeneyra, R. et al. (2000): “Patient Centeredness in Medical Encounters Requiring an Interpreter”, The American Journal of Medicine, 18: 470-474.
Montalt, V. (2017): “Patient-centred translation and emerging trends in medicine and healthcare”, EST Newsletter 51: 10-11.

Keywords: medical translation and interpreting, patient-centered communication

Author bio:

Ana Muñoz-Miquel is a lecturer in the Translation and Communication Department at the Universitat Jaume I (UJI). Her doctoral thesis, on the profile and competences of medical translators, won the Special Doctorate Award at the UJI and the Biennial Best Thesis Award granted by the Iberian Association for Translation and Interpreting Studies. During her career she has worked as a freelance translator and has been a pre-doctoral and post-doctoral researcher at the UJI. She is currently a member of the GENTT research group (UJI) and a collaborator in the CiTrans group (Universitat de València). Her research interests include medical translation, competence-based training and communication aimed at patients.

Seeber, K.G., Keller, L., Amos, R., and Hengl, S.

FTI, University of Geneva, Switzerland

The attitude of interpreters providing Video Remote Conference Interpreting during the 2014 FIFA World Cup™ was analyzed using a mixed methods approach. Quantitative and qualitative data pertaining to six deductive categories (general and specific attitude towards remote interpreting, attitude towards the work environment and the workspace, psychological and physiological wellbeing) were collected. Online questionnaires were completed both before and after the event and structured interviews were conducted on site during the event. Triangulation of results corroborates the technical feasibility of video remote interpreting, whilst highlighting aspects with a high potential to shape interpreters’ attitude towards it. The quality of the technical team on site along with the availability of visual input in the entire conference room (including all speakers taking the floor) is key to offsetting the feeling of alienation or lack of immersion experienced by interpreters working with this technical setup. Suggestions for the improvement of key parameters are provided.

Keywords: remote interpreting, attitude, workspace, wellbeing, immersion

Bio sketch of presenter:

Kilian G. Seeber is Associate Professor and Director of the Interpreting Department at the Faculty of Translation and Interpreting of the University of Geneva in Switzerland. His research focuses on cognitive load and integration during multilingual and multimodal language processing with a focus on simultaneous interpreting. He has published widely and co-edited a special issue of the International Journal of Bilingualism on cognitive processes in simultaneous interpreters. He heads up the International Association of Conference Interpreters’ (AIIC) Research Committee.

Yalta Y. Chen

Newcastle University, United Kingdom

“I really feel I need to re-consider whether I want to become an interpreter,” were the first words in a retrospective report written by an interpreting student who just finished an interpreting work placement. This may be a more extreme case but it is not uncommon that students report feeling frustrated after completing a work placement or authentic interpreting job. While most, if not all, interpreting students appreciate work placements as great learning opportunities, there are apparently reasons that might de-motivate them to such an extent that they become uncertain about and, in extreme cases, lose interest in entering the profession of interpreting. What causes such affective de-motivation? How do interpreting students make sense of the professional interpreting world through work placements? What does this mean to course or curriculum design? 

To answer these questions, an empirical study, spanning four years, was conducted to investigate interpreting students’ work placement experience that involved bi-lateral, consecutive and/or simultaneous interpreting. Retrospective self-reports from 35 students were collected. Nine of them were invited to in-depth interview. Different types of affective practice and emotion were categorised and analysed against existing cognitive models of interpreting with a purpose to differentiate cognitive motivation and competence from social-emotive motivation and competence. The factors contributing to the students’ psychological cost and gain were subsequently identified as well as the correlation among them. The findings revealed a surprisingly complex professional reality - or realities - that novice interpreters have to face. Suggestions are thus made for curriculum and course design with an aim to better prepare novice interpreters professionally.

Keywords (no more than 3 words):
Social-emotive competence, psychological cost and gain, interpreting work placement

Author Bio:

Dr. Yalta Chen is a lecture in translating and interpreting at Newcastle University.

Michaela Albl-Mikasa

Zurich University of Applied Sciences, Switzerland

Different paradigms give rise to a different understanding of ‘cognition’. Cognitivism views cognition as activated schemata or as arising as a result of relating a new piece of experience to the existing mental representations of already made experiences rather than to entities in the world. Connectivism describes cognition as emergent neural global patterns so that it is no longer located in particular symbols, but is a function of the global state of the system and resides in complex patterns of neural activity that emerge from the interactions of many of the systems’ constituents. From the perspective of enactivism (Varela 1997), finally, cognition is understood as patterns of embodied experience and rooted in the structures of our biological embodiment as well as our socio-cultural history (Varela et al 1991).

Notions such as emergentism and embodiment have been taken up in the epistemological foundation of translation didactics (Kiraly 2013). But what exactly do they mean for the description of creativity in translation and interpreting? If, as Kiraly points out, the interpretation of the source text is not a constructivist process of coherence building but emerges from embodied experience in the translation/interpreting situation (Risku 2010), then what does that mean for translation and interpretation comprehension and production processes?
High-end experts in all fields, including translation and interpreting, speak of their embodied activity in terms of “flow”, “feeling”, “becoming one”. Based on in-depth interviews with professional conference interpreters, this paper presents receptivism (Albl-Mikasa 2014) as an intertraditional approach to translators’ and interpreters’ non-rational experience and explains the differences between intuition and creativity and what this means for (cognitive) decision-making processes.

Keywords: cognition, creativity, intuition

Author Bio:

Michaela Albl-Mikasa is Professor of Interpreting Studies and Lecturer in Applied Linguistics at Zurich University of Applied Sciences, Switzerland.

Elisabet Tiselius 

Stockholm University, Swedan 

Heidi Smith Luedtke

US Air Force Academy, USA

Dialogue interpreting, when the interpreter is on site and interprets between at least two participants, puts different requirements on the interpreter both cognitively and emotionally compared to other types of interpreting. The dialogue interpreter monitors the participants’ contributions to the dialogue, ensures comprehension between the two participants, handles all participants’ turn taking, and deals with asymmetrical levels of their own language knowledge in the two working languages. Presumably these activities require both cognitive and emotional competencies.

In this study, interpreters with different levels of experience (n=19) are compared from both a cognitive and an emotional perspective. Participants in the study performed a 25-minute dialogue interpretation role play with two trained actors while wearing eye-tracking glasses. In a separate session, participants completed a background questionnaire about their interpreting experience, along with measures of cognitive ability, including working memory, and emotional intelligence (MSCEIT; Mayer, Salovey and Caruso 2000).

Analyses compare experienced and beginning-level interpreters using data on their cognitive skills, working memory and eye movements, and on their emotion-knowledge and emotion-management skills. We hypothesized that interpreters with more experience at interpreting will show greater skill at handling both the cognitive and emotional demands of the interpreting task, and this will be evident in the interpreters’ subjective reflections on their experience during the interpreting role-play task.

Keywords: Dialogue interpreting, emotional ability, eye-tracking

Author Bio:

Elisabet Tiselius is a senior lecturer in Translation studies with a focus on interpreting. I'm also director of studies for interpreting at the Institute for Interpreting and Translation Studies, Department of Swedish Language and Multilingualism at Stockholm University.

Heidi Luedtke: I received my PhD in Personality and Social Ecology from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, where my early research focused on measures of emotional well-being and life satisfaction. I am keenly interested in measurement issues, and in the assessment of personality traits and emotional competencies that allow people to manage everyday stressors and adapt to challenging interpersonal encounters. My work at the United States Air Force Academy centers on developing personal-, social- and leadership skills in future military leaders. 

Damien Jiaming Fan 

National Taiwan University, Taiwan 

Despite the increasing establishment of post-graduate level interpreting programs in recent decades, there are still quite a number of practicing interpreters who are not institutionally trained. Some of them are multilingual employees of an organisation who have professional expertise in non-language fields. Others taught themselves interpreting and gradually became established. These self-taught interpreters continue to maintain a loyal clientele and thrive on the market. What competitive advantages, then, do students who receive formal training have? How are they going to compete against these seasoned interpreters? These questions probably point to a bigger elephant in the room: are interpreting schools really providing effective, meaningful, and useful education?

Through three separate small-scale studies, the simultaneous and consecutive interpreting performances of six self-taught interpreters and three institutionally-trained interpreters who were all active in their respective markets were compared in the areas of accuracy (percentage of meaning units correctly conveyed) and delivery (assessed by groups of non-interpreter audiences). Results showed that institutionally-trained interpreters were more cognizant of using strategies to overcome problems encountered, but this did not necessarily lead to higher accuracy. In addition, institutionally-trained interpreters were overwhelmingly favoured by most audience members, as they demonstrated a higher awareness of delivery fluency and good voice quality. More importantly, institutionally-trained interpreters seemed to have taken less time to reach similar levels of proficiency to that of the self-taught interpreters. These findings possibly present a small piece of evidence in validating the effectiveness, efficiency, and meaning of interpreting schools.

Keywords: self-taught, institutionally-trained, awareness

Author Bio:

Damien is Assistant Professor of conference interpreting at National Taiwan University. He is also a freelance conference interpreter based in Taipei, Taiwan, and a member of AIIC (International Association of Conference Interpreters). He mostly teaches courses on Chinese to English consecutive and simultaneous interpreting. Damien received his PhD in July 2013 from National Taiwan Normal University with a dissertation entitled "Sentence comprehension in expert and novice interpreters: An ERP study". His research interests include cognitive psychology, psycholinguistics, neurolinguistics, and interpreting pedagogy.

Binghua Wang 

University of Leeds, United Kingdom 

After a brief review of major perspectives and approaches in interpreting studies, this presentation will proceed from the distinctive features of interpreting and argue about the necessity of going beyond the dominant cognitive process(ing) perspective and of examining information processing in interpreting. Two models of multi-modal communication in interpreting of the two typical working mode (consecutive and simultaneous) will be proposed, which highlight the interaction among verbal information, paraverbal information and nonverbal information in interpreting and the link between cognition, communication and emotion in interpreting.
In order to explore an approach that can capture the different layers of information in interpreting, the relevancy of the emerging approach of multimodal analysis will be evaluated. A multi-layer multimodal analytic framework will then be constructed integrating the verbal, paraverbal and nonverbal semiotics in interpreting, which emphasize the triangulation among the analyses into different aspects of information processing and communication in interpreting. Such a framework may help to distinguish interpreting studies form general translation studies.

Keywords: information processing in interpreting; verbal, paraverbal and nonverbal communication; a multi-layer multimodal analytic framework

Author Bio:

Binhua Wang is professor of interpreting and translation studies in the Centre for Translation Studies at University of Leeds. Before joining Leeds, he had been assistant professor at Hong Kong Polytechnic University and associate professor at Guangdong University of Foreign Studies. As a veteran English/Chinese conference interpreter, he is Fellow of the “Chartered Institute of Linguists” (CIOL). His research interests lie in various aspects of interpreting and translation studies, in which he supervises PhD students. He has published over 50 articles including nearly 40 in refereed CSSCI/Core journals and SSCI/A&HCI journals such as Interpreting, Meta, Perspectives and Babel.

Elena Zagar Galvão 

University of Porto (FLUP), Portugal 

This paper explores the impact of context, more specifically setting and working conditions, on interpreters’ creativity in live TV simultaneous interpreting. Creativity is considered both in terms of interpreters’ ability to adapt to and infuence the situational aspects of a live interpreting assignment on TV, and as the use of a variety of textual solutions to the multiple challenges posed by the source text.
The exploration was carried out by means of a case study of the three 2016 US presidential debates, all of which were bradcast live with voice-over interpreting on the Portuguese TV channel SIC Notícias. The communicative situation involved in the three media events was investigated through semi-structured interviews with the four interpreters involved in the assignment as well as the member of the TV production team responsible for hiring interpreters. These data were complemented by a field visit to the TV studio in which the interpreters worked. A corpus-based methodology was used to explore creativity in terms of interpreters’ textual production. The fluent transcriptions of both the original debates and their interpretations were organized into a parallel corpus and analysed using Corpógrafo (http://www.linguateca.pt/Corpografo/). The comparative analysis focused on instances of literal translation, especially reproduction of syntactic structures, transference of source language elements, translation of idioms and of culture-specific items.
While the analysis of the data from the interviews shows that there is some room for interpreters’ ‘creative’ suggestions for improving working contidions, the preliminary results from the corpus analysis suggests that there is little room for interpreters’ creativity under the constraints imposed by this specific assignment.

Keywords: live TV interpreting, creativity, corpus-based approach

Author Bio:

Elena Zagar Galvão obtained her PhD in Translation Studies from the Faculty of Arts of the University of Porto (FLUP), Portugal, with a thesis on gesture in simultaneous interpreting. She has an MA in English Studies from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, where she was a Fulbright grantee, a post-graduate diploma in Translation and Terminology from FLUP, and a degree in Translation from the University of Trieste, Italy. She teaches translation at FLUP and has published articles on multimodality in interpreting. She is a member of the AIIC and the Portuguese Association of Conference Interpreters (APIC).

Jindra Dvořáková 

Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic 

The case study explores the role of interpreters at the Prague Writers' Festival (www.pwf.cz) with a special focus on the process of interpreting. The Festival has featured a number of well-known authors, e.g. Arthur Miller, William Styron, Ian McEwan, Nadine Gordimer, Gao Xingjian, Derek Walcott, J.M. Coetzee, to name but a few. The Festival organises public readings and conversations with authors which are interpreted to Czech, English and other languages as required.

Discourse at literary festivals is often seen as highly demanding in terms of linguistic and background knowledge, as well as high expectations of the users of interpreting. In addition to specific linguistic challenges in the source text (poetic, figurative or idiosyncratic expressions, slang, emotionally charged source texts), interpreting at a literary festival is highly demanding in terms of target language delivery, particularly prosody.
What do interpreters see as particularly challenging about working for the Prague Writers’ Festival? What adds to the stress of interpreting at the Festival compared to standard conferences? What strategies do interpreters use to face up to the challenges? Are there any incentives for better performance that might possibly offset the stressors? Can interpreting output live up to the standard of written literary translation?

To answer the questions above the case study deploys empirical qualitative research methods, in particular questionnaires and semi-structured interviews. Interpreters are asked to reflect on their task at the Festival: aspects of the source language discourse (message form and content, accent, delivery style, etc.), the working conditions (sound quality, view of the speaker, availability of information, etc.). The final analysis provides insight into conference interpreting within a particular setting, identifies routes for further research and offers practical advice for event organisers and interpreters alike.

Author Bio:

The author, a freelance conference interpreter, member of AIIC, a doctoral programme student, researcher and interpreter trainer has extensive conference interpreting experience, works regularly for EU institutions. Over the past 19 years she has worked as a consultant interpreter for the Prague Writers’ Festival.

Gys-Walt van Egdom 

Zuyd University of Applied Sciences, the Netherlands 

Winibert Segers 

KU Leuven, Belgium 

Henri Bloemen 

Zuyd University of Applied Sciences, the Netherlands 

Fedde Van Santen 

Zuyd University of Applied Sciences, the Netherlands 

The notion of “creativity” has been slumming around in translation theory for centuries. Therefore, it is but a truism to say that translation is a creative act. Remarkably, the notion does not occupy a central position in the slew of translation competence models that has been advanced in recent years. In most competence models, the notion is subsumed under various (sub)competences (e.g. strategic competence). The downplaying of the notion in these frameworks, however, does not relieve translator training of the responsibility of teaching and testing translative creativity. Even less so since creativity is found among the oft-listed 21st century skills that are to ensure graduate employability in a rapidly changing labour market.
In this contribution, emphasis is placed on the assessment of translative creativity. Following up on an exploratory study carried out at KU Leuven and Zuyd University of Applied Sciences (Segers, Bloemen, and Van Egdom, forthcoming; Bloemen et al., forthcoming), and drawing on insights gained from studies on creativity and translative creativity, we have devised a three-level test with a view to assessing the acquisition of translative creativity progressively. This test has been administered to students enrolled in three different years of three different (“preparatory”) translation programs (ITV University of Applied Sciences for Translation and Interpreting, KU Leuven, and Zuyd University of Applied Sciences). In addition to the translative creativity test, a questionnaire on general creativity was administered to gain fuller understanding of these same students’ self-perception of creativity. In this paper, we will discuss the results of this two-pronged project.

Keywords: 21th century skills – Translation Competence – Assessment

Author Bio:

Dr Gys-Walt van Egdom, lecturer-researcher, Zuyd University of Applied Sciences
Dr Winibert Segers, assistant professor, KU Leuven
Dr Henri Bloemen, associate professor, Zuyd University of Applied Sciences
Mr Fedde Van Santen, lecturer Zuyd, University of Applied Sciences

Hanna Risku 

University of Vienna, Austria

Barbara Meinx 

University of Graz, Austria 

The present presentation examines the emotional and motivational aspects of the translation process while taking into account the social embeddedness of the translators involved in their real working environment. The aim of the qualitative workplace study is to capture and explore the complexity of translation processes in terms of translation networks, actors and environments and to place special emphasis on the social embeddedness of cognition in translation. Thus translation is studied as an interaction process and as a form of cooperative, IT-assisted text design. The two independent empirical settings selected for this explorative study are the translation department of an Austrian public-sector institution and a private translation agency that outsources translation projects to freelancers and other translation agencies and deals with translation project management. Authentic work situations are investigated, using ethnographic research methods, i.e. extended periods of participative observation and semi-structured expert interviews, as a means of collecting data. The interviews are conducted with translators, project managers and their line managers. The field notes are complemented with research diaries and individual and joint reflection and qualitative content analysis sessions. The results indicate that the translators involved experience a wide variety of emotions related to their social embeddedness in their working environment. These range from satisfaction, pride, relief and joy through pressure and dislike to frustration. It becomes evident that emotions have an impact on the job motivation and actions undertaken by the translators and occasionally lead to the conscious use of coping strategies.

Keywords: emotion, motivation, translation workplace

Author Bio:

Hanna Risku is Professor for Translation Studies at the University of Vienna in Austria. Prior to her work in Vienna, she was Professor for Translation Studies at the University of Graz and Professor for Applied Cognitive Science and Technical Communication, Vice Rector and Head of Department at the Danube University Krems in Austria. In the course of her career, she has also lectured at various universities in Finland, Sweden, Denmark and Spain. Her main areas of interest are translation, cognition and cooperation, situated cognition, network analysis, usability and information design.

Barbara Meinx, Department of Translation Studies, University of Graz, Austria.

Katerina Perdikaki & Nadia Georgiou

University of Surrey, United Kingdom

This paper discusses the emotions experienced by subtitlers who subtitle sensitive audiovisual material. ‘Sensitive audiovisual material’ refers to audiovisual texts which deal with controversial and emotive topics, such as the abuse of animals and/or people, war, torture, and death, to name but a few. This topic has remained under-researched in the area of subtitling, despite having been sporadically explored in other fields of translation (Hubscher Davidson 2017; Rojo and Ramos Caro 2016; Tabakowska 2016).

The issue of emotional impact has been extensively covered in literature related to interpreting. In many areas of interpreting (Public Service Interpreting (PSI), healthcare interpreting, mental health interpreting) interpreters often face emotionally demanding situations and are affected when relaying traumatic experiences (Hsieh and Nicodemus 2015; MacIntyre and Wyne 2010). In literary translation, the translator experiences various emotions both as reader of the literary narrative and as mediator between the narrator and the fictitious characters, on the one hand, and the target readership, on the other (Tabakowska 2016).

The paper will present and discuss the preliminary findings of a questionnaire survey with 75 amateur and professional subtitlers of various language combinations. It will firstly establish some background information on the participants of the study, including training and years of experience; it will then introduce the communicative modes of audiovisual texts through which an emotional effect is elicited. The discussion will focus on types of emotions experienced by subtitlers and on their personal accounts of the effect of these emotions on their performance. This study offers significant insights into the little-explored aspect of the effect of emotions on subtitler cognition and performance during the subtitling process.

Keywords: Emotions, subtitling, empirical

Author Bio:

Katerina Perdikaki completed her PhD entitled “Adaptation as Translation: Examining Film Adaptation as a Recontextualised Act of Communication” at the University of Surrey in 2016. In 2013, she was awarded an MA in Audiovisual Translation by the same institution. She has taught modules on translation theory and audiovisual translation. Currently, she teaches Specialist Translation from English into Greek at the University of Surrey and she works as a freelance subtitler.

Nadia Georgiou was awarded a BA in Foreign Languages and Translation from the Ionian University in 2010. In 2012 she completed an MA in Comparative Literary Studies at Goldsmiths College, University of London. She is currently a PhD candidate at the Centre for Translation Studies, University of Surrey. She has been working as a freelance translator (technical as well as literary translation, subtitling and medical interpreting) since 2010 both in Greece and the UK.

Paulina Pietrzak

University of Łódź, Poland

The understanding of the role of the contemporary translator is fraught with contradictions and idealistic visions of individuals who, by definition, should be fully competent and versatile. In spite of the fact that lots of translation researchers have probed into the identification and exploration of the concept of translator competence (e.g. Lörscher 1992, 2005; Koller 1979; Grucza 1985, 1993; Schäffner and Adab 2000; Gile 1994, 1995; González Davies 2004; Göpferich 2009; Gouadec 2007; Kelly 2005, 2008; Kiraly 1995, 2000; 2000, 2005, 2015, 2016; PACTE 2003, 2009, 2011; Pym 1991, 2003, 2009, 2011, 2013), little study has been devoted to its metacognitive aspects.

Due to the dynamic nature of the translator’s occupation, it is difficult to predict what specific skills will prove useful for novice translators in their professional career. Thus, it is crucial that the translator be self-regulated enough to adapt to changing job demands and effectively function in the contemporary, highly dynamic, translation market. The objective of the presentation is to investigate the role and nature of the translator’s metacognitive activity. It will also demonstrate the results of a pilot study into translation trainees’ self-regulation and its correlation with the quality of their translations. The author will discuss the implications of these findings for translator training in relation to theories of student empowerment.

Keywords: cognitive translation research, translator training, self-regulation

Author Bio:

Paulina Pietrzak is an assistant professor of Linguistics; she has been affiliated with University of Łódź, Poland, since 2008. She did her PhD on translator education and developing translator competence. She teaches LGP and LSP translation and interpreting in the Department of Translation Studies. She is a freelance translator and interpreter. Her main research interests include translator training, the theory and practice of translation and interpreting and specialised languages.

David Heath

Kanto Gakuin University, Yokohama, Japan

Research into audiovisual translation for television focuses on dubbing, voiceover, and subtitling. Translation of scripts for delivery to camera appears to be vastly under-researched. However, much (possibly most) script content for delivery to camera on NHK World TV (the international English-language television service of Japan’s public broadcaster, NHK) consists of translation from Japanese. I wish to shed light on this translation and explain how cognition, emotion, and creativity relate to key aspects of contributions that I make as a translator.

I have been the translator and language consultant for NHK World TV’s weekly music show J-MELO since the show was launched in 2005. J-MELO is studio-based with a solo presenter, who reads her scripts (the results of translation processes) off a teleprompter. All script content is written initially in Japanese. The source language (SL) shares few lexicosyntactic features with the target language (TL) and is rooted in a different sociocultural milieu.

A key challenge lies in producing target text (TT) that sounds conversational and thus, presumably, gives the viewer a sense of rapport with the presenter and enables effective communication. Notably, I must resist a tendency for SL features to push me toward using unconversational TL features, e.g., “the nominal style” (Block, 1997, p. 129) or starting a sentence “with a participial phrase or a dependent clause” (Block, 1997, p. 5). This process depends, inter alia, on my cognition of differences between SL and TL conversational and television-writing norms, on my creativity in transforming SL structures through non-literal translation, and on emotional judgements by which I evaluate and refine the TT.

Cognition and emotion also relate to interpersonal relationships on the production side as my freedom to translate non-literally depends largely on trust that I have earned from J-MELO’s producer, directors, and presenter (all non-translator native Japanese speakers).

Keywords: television, international, Japan

Note: I have obtained written permission from J-MELO’s producer to use ST and TT samples.

Author Bio:

David Heath is an Associate Professor responsible for translation studies at Kanto Gakuin University in Japan. He is also the managing director of a translation-focused Japanese media company that serves the international operations of Japan’s public broadcaster, NHK. He holds an MA (with distinction) in translation studies from the University of Portsmouth. He is a Chartered Linguist and a Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Linguists. He is a member of the European Association for Studies in Screen Translation, the European Society for Translation Studies, the International Association for Translation and Intercultural Studies, and the Japan Association of Translators.

Seyed Reza Beh-Afarin

Islamic Azad University, Iran

This paper is an attempt to analyze the scope of Iranian English translation undergraduates’ creativity and historical imagination when translating Mac Dizdar’s poetry into Persian. The researcher selected three samples from Stone Sleeper (Kameni Spavač, translated into English by Francis R. Jones) for the purpose of this study; i.e., Roads, BBBB, and House in Milé, which were relatively long poems and could be used in the translation tasks. The tasks were part of participants’ Literary Translation course assignment. In the first stage, the researcher presented the introductory lines (or the first stanza) of each poem and asked the students to finish the writing task in English. The participants were required to read the introductory section and finish each poem as a take-home assignment. No information was given to the participants about the poems, the book, the poet, the translator, etc. The reason behind keeping the participants unaware of such information was to cultivate creative writing. In the second stage, the participants were required to translate into Persian what they had written in English. The three tasks were then collected for analysis. Content analysis revealed peculiar constraints in the mode of written discourse utilized by each of the 23 participants who created the new texts against the backdrop of their particular set of socio-historical values. The results also suggested that the metaphorical spheres created by the participants failed to act the way national identity is textured by Dizdar in his reconstruction of Bosnian identity. The written poetries, nevertheless, provided a humanizing glimpse into the cognitive geography of the Iranian student-translators and were socio-cognitively informative. The formation of new historical identities could hardly be portrayed in a vivid background for the moving and suspenseful written poetries, but it certainly assigned a new role in the historical imagination of the participants.

Keywords: Stone Sleeper, Persian, Translation

Author Bio:

Born in Tehran in 1968, SEYED REZA BEH-AFARIN holds a Ph.D. in Applied Linguistics. He is currently the faculty of English Translation Department at Islamic Azad University, Northern Tehran, where he lectures diverse subjects of English translation and advises M.A. and Ph.D. candidates. His research areas of interest include translation studies, translator/interpreter education, CAT tools, materials development, multilingualism, literary translation, and Diaspora studies, which he has passionately pursued over the past 18 years. In addition to academic exertion, Dr. Beh-Afarin is Certified Translator to the Judiciary and a simultaneous interpreter to many cultural and scientific gatherings in Iran and overseas.

Ying Cui

Shandong University, China

The brand name is an important asset of a business, for consumers rely on brand names to identify goods for purchase. English-Chinese brand name translation is of significance, as it influences how the brand is received in China which has become one of the largest consumer markets in the world. Brand names often cause consumers’ emotional response in order to enhance their memory, establish positive images about the brands, and serve the purpose of promotion. This paper offers a pilot study on emotional involvement in English-Chinese brand name translation by exploring the presentation of brand personality in translation. The causes for and types of emotional involvement are investigated with reference to studies on brand personality which can invoke consumers’ emotional response and plays a key role in enhancing consumers’ loyalty to and trust of a brand, and a revised framework of brand personality for Chinese brand name translations is provided on the basis of current research on English and Chinese brand personality as well as observation of our corpus. The examples in our corpus are analyzed according to this framework, and the features of emotional involvement in the Chinese translations are summarized and discussed.

Keywords: Brand name, emotion, image, memory, personality, translation

Author Bio:

Ying Cui received her PhD from City University of Hong Kong. She was a visiting scholar at Cornell University. She is now an Associate Professor at the School of Translation Studies, Shandong University, Weihai, China. Her major research interests include translation, poetics, and linguistics, particularly advertisement translation and cognitive poetics. She has published papers in various journals such as Babel: International Journal for Translation, Perspectives: Studies in Translatology and JoSTrans: The Journal of Specialised Translation, written chapters for Media and Translation: An Interdisciplinary Approach and Handbook of Translation Studies and Linguistics, and co-edited Handbook of Research on Teaching Methods in Language Translation and Interpretation.

Guilherme da Silva Braga

Universidade de Coimbra, Portugal

The translation of wordplays and other language-specific devices has long been a point of debate in translation studies, and due to the very nature of the challenge they pose, no theory of translation could be expected to properly address the problem without resorting to translator’s creativity. This is the case even when these devices are not at the forefront of a given text. How to proceed, then, when translating a full-length literary work whose very existence depends on them?

David Lodge's Deaf Sentence (2008) introduces Desmond Bates, a retired academic with a failing sense of hearing who spends some of the most important pages in the novel making wordplays on the pair “death”/”deaf”. Desmond quotes classic and modern works of English literature replacing the original word “death” with “deaf”, presenting interpretations of the resulting excerpts and relating them to his experience with deafness. He refers to wordplays, misunderstandings and descriptions related to English phonology in coherent narrative contexts; remembers English proverbs, songs and poems related to ears and hearing; presents linguistic puzzles in English; and, by the end of the book, makes explicit meta-comments about the recurring wordplays on “death” and ”deaf” throughout the novel.

By drawing on Katharina Reiß and Hans Vermeer’s Skopostheorie (1984), recently revisited by Christiane Nord (1997, 2016), I propose a discussion of the strategies employed in Surdo mundo, my published translation of Deaf Sentence into Brazilian Portuguese. By refusing to use translator's notes to explain language-specific problems or declare them “untranslatable”, I found myself obliged to develop creative translation procedures aligned with the witty and playful character of the original work. By discussing concrete examples from Deaf Sentence and presenting a corresponding theoretical framework for dealing with similarly creative texts, I hope to present useful tools to other translators faced with similar problems.

Keywords: creative translation; Skopostheorie; translation studies

Author Bio:

Guilherme da Silva Braga holds a Ph.D. and an M.A. in Literature Studies and has twelve years of experience as a literary translator. With over fifty published translations of works by world-class authors from English, Norwegian and Swedish into Brazilian Portuguese, he has been an appointed literary translator in residence in Hungary, Ireland, Norway and Switzerland, and has offered postgraduate lectures on literary translation at PUC-RS (Brazil) and Trinity College Dublin (Ireland). In 2016, he was nominated for the prestigious Prêmio Jabuti for best literary translation published in Brazil. He is currently doing post-doctoral research at Universidade de Coimbra, Portugal.

Marián Morón Martín

University Pablo de Olavide, Seville, Spain

Creativity is a must in business and marketing services for the construction of a brand image and in order to respond to target audience needs. These are demanding tasks when brands travel across languages and cultures. For this reason, the Translation sector has come to identify different services in order to address businesses’ communicative needs in the global market. Localisation, internationalization, transcreation, and even copywriting services are offered to companies willing to develop beyond their national boundaries (Ray and Kelly, 2010). The Internet and the consolidation of e-commerce services are also challenging companies to deal with communicative barriers.

In the present piece of work, we will present an innovation and research project at the University Pablo de Olavide in Spain aiming at developing creativity and creative translation services. Faced with two different briefs from two different clients of the textile and fashion sector in Ireland and the UK, 4th-year undergraduate students had to respond to transcreation challenges. The creation of new slogans, hashtags and campaign names adapted to the Spanish target audience, together with the gimmicky fashion brands’ marketing technical writing, made our students reflect on the varying nature of transcreation as compared to translation. Here, we will discuss the main outcomes of the experience, from the participants’ point of view, and their final assessment on creativity and creative translation skills development.

Keywords: Transcreation, Assessment, Creativity

Author Bio:

Graduated from the University of Granada, Dr. Morón has worked as a translation researcher and trainer since 2003. Her main areas of research are: business translation, the impact of international and intercultural training experiences in translators’ training, translation competence, and translator’s employability. Dr. Morón has participated in various national and international research projects and locally coordinated the OTCT Erasmus+ project aiming at developing translation students’ employability and entrepreneurial skills in cooperative translation tasks. Recently, she has supervised a two-year research and innovation project at the University Pablo de Olavide, in Spain, on transcreation and copywriting, as new emerging profiles in the language provision industry.

Celia Martín de León

Universidad de Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain

Vygotsky characterized imagination as the source of creativity, and the production of mental imagery has been empirically associated with creativity in different domains, including music composition, scientific research and translation. Adopting a dynamic perspective on mental imagery based on the notions of “active perception” and “mental simulation,” imagination can be described as a process of multimodal (re)creation of experience that may be related to the process of “seeing as,” which is at the core of creativity.

The aim of this study is to investigate the interplay between imagination and creativity in the translation processes of 33 translation students who translated 9 texts of different types from English into Spanish, and produced a creative version of a Spanish text. After each translation/text production process, they filled in a questionnaire about the mental images they remembered having experienced during the process. Participants’ individual preferences and abilities in the use of mental imagery were profiled with a self-report questionnaire (Object-Spatial Imagery and Verbal Questionnaire), with the aim to investigate the possible relationships between the translators’ individual cognitive styles, the number and detail of their reported mental images, and the creativity of their productions.

In order to assess creativity, a procedure based on choice network analysis was developed, in which the different translations of each text were compared and graded for novelty and adequacy. With this procedure, the novelty of each translation was assessed against the backdrop of the most frequent renderings. A preliminary analysis suggests a positive relationship between the number and detail of the reported images and the assessed degree of creativity of the translations. The detailed description of this relationship and the identification of the effects that individual cognitive profiles may exert on creativity can contribute to reach a deeper understanding of the role played by creativity in translation processes.

Keywords: Translation; imagination; creativity

Author Bio:

Celia Martín de León is an Associate Professor in Translation at the University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria in Spain. Since 2002, she has belonged to the PETRA Research Group (Expertise and Environment in Translation, Spanish acronym), devoted to empirical research into translation processes. Her research focuses on translation processes from the viewpoint of embodied and embedded cognition. She has published articles in Target, Hermēneus, and Hermes, among other journals, and book chapters in De Gruyter, St. Jerome, Bloomsbury, Wiley Blackwell and Peter Lang, mainly on metaphor, implicit theories, and imagination in translation.

Yvonne Tsai

National Taiwan University, Taiwan

Translation as a collaborative effort has received unprecedented attention in translation studies in recent years. Collaborative translation is an interactive process in which both parties benefit from each other. Collaborative translation activities enable students to brainstorm and stimulate creativity. This study examines collaborative creativity in song translation and describes the strategies made by song translators. Songs are composed of music, lyrics, and prospective performance, while music include melody, harmony and musical sense. Song translators may consider the properties of music when translating the lyrics, write new lyrics, adapt the music to the translation, or adapt the translation to the music. Singable translations encompass prosodic, poetic, and semantic-reflexive features. Strategies balancing singability, sense, naturalness, rhyme, and rhythm are discussed from a functional point of view. This study discusses collaborative creativity in the translation of songs by Chinese students. In groups of 3 or 4, the students translate songs from English into Chinese. By collaborating, students’ creativity is inspired and stimulated.

Keywords: song translation, collaborative creativity, collaborative translation

Author Bio:

Yvonne Tsai is an Associate Professor in the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures at National Taiwan University. She received her MA in Translation and Interpreting from the University of Bath and her Ph.D. in Translation Studies from Newcastle University. Her major research interests include specialized translation, translation technology, and translation pedagogy. 

Maria Sidiropoulou

National and Kapodistrian University of Athens/ELKE, Greece

The interaction between cognition/emotion/creativity and translation is a rather under-researched area, especially in audiovisual translation where part of the cognitive work is done by the audio-visual material and subtitles simply guide viewers through the plot. The question arises as to how weak is the contribution of the verbal message in audiovisual contexts and whether/how certain verbal phenomena in subtitles may be complemented or not by audiovisual elements.

The study focuses on the phenomenon of im/politeness in English-speaking audiovisual products with Greek subtitles and Greek audiovisual productions with English subtitles. The intention is to identify potential shifts in the audiovisual contribution to the verbal message carried by the subtitles, relative to the genre of the audiovisual product.

Audiovisual products are excellent windows to socio-cognitive linguistic phenomena because they can simulate the interactional perspective in communication, either between fictional addressees ( e.g. examining politeness in harmonious relationships and impoliteness/aggression in conflictual frames) or between speaker and viewer as participants in the communicative situation in non-fictional contexts. Face-saving or relational work are shown to be strategically enacted in emotion-rich audiovisual contexts.

Keywords: audiovisual, socio-cognitive, im/politeness

Author Bio:

Maria Sidiropoulou is Professor of Translation Studies and Chair of the Department of English Language and Literature, School of Philosophy, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. She was president of the Interuniversity and Interfaculty Co-ordinating Committee of the Translation-Translatology MA Programme of the University of Athens, in 2009-2011 and director of the Language and Linguistics Department of the Faculty of English in 2004-2006. She has taught in two postgraduate programmes for a number of years. Her recent publications (books, co-/edited volumes, articles) deal with intercultural issues manifested through translation in the press, in advertising, in academic discourse, in EU documentation, in literature, on stage and screen. She is founding member of the META-FRASEIS/ΜΕΤΑ-ΦΡΑΣΕΙΣ translation Programme.

Shabnam Naderi

Allameh Tabataba’ie university, Tehran, Iran

Considering a shift from translation studies to translator studies, translators are no longer merely targets of effects or governed by other phenomena. They, themselves, have effects and as agents of change need to speak for themselves. It has always been axiomatic to the writer’s intuition that creativity grows out of limitation; this is, of course, taken not given. The present research, using Andrew Chesterman’s five types of ethics as its main theoretical framework, seeks to study translators’ creative strategies in translating some selected novels from English to Persian within the context of Iran considering the ethical and norm-based principles set for translators in such a context; it also investigates how successful they are in reconstructing meanings taking into account all the limitations. In the first phase of this study, the selected novels are subjected to an analysis in order to find out cases where the types of ethics (namely ethics of service, ethics of representation, ethics of communication, norm-based ethics, and ethics of commitment) are the most influential in reinforcing translator’s creative decisions. In the second phase traces of the translators’ emotions are focused upon in paratextual features of the text (footnotes, forewords, back cover notes, etc) where they can build a relationship with their audience and explain the changes or the creative strategies used during the process of translation. In other words the researcher is at pains to investigate translators’ creative strategies reinforced by the ethical matters through observed manifestations in texts as well as paratexts. The present abstract reports on an on-going study the result of which are going to be out soon.

Keywords:  Ethics, creativity, paratext

Author Bio:

Shabnam Naderi is a PhD student of translation studies at Allameh Tabataba’ie University, Tehran, Iran. She received her B.A and M.A in translation studies from the same university. She presented an M.A thesis on “Translation and Ethics” in which she proposed an integrated model for studying ethics in translation and wrote 2 articles on the same topic, presented in 2 conferences in Iran and published in “Translation Studies” Journal. She is currently busy passing her PhD courses at university and writing papers. Her main field of interest is sociology of translation and has participated in 4 conferences on translation as a member of the executive committee.