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Magdalena Dombek

Thursday, 02 February 2012 12:24

Translation Techniques in the Asiatic Cultures

SECOND CALL FOR PAPERS

Translation Techniques in the Asiatic Cultures

Chair: Artemij Keidan, University of Rome "La Sapienza")

Panel description

General premise

Modern studies on language (both in linguistics and in philosophy) made clear that in the human communication the linguistic expressions proper are only a constituent part of a more complex and manyfold process. Not everything that the hearers of a message understand is actually uttered by the speakers. A very big amount of information is left unsaid. In order to understand the message, the hearer has to obtain the missing pieces of knowledge from his internal encyclopedia, or to infer the information from the circumstances of the discourse and some general assumptions shared by all the speakers.

A few authors may be mentioned, whose works are very revealing in this respect. Thus, Louis HJELMSLEV (1953) has shown the great importance of the meta-semioticlayers of the communication. Not only the semantic content (or denotation) of a message, i.e. what is said, is important and informative, but also the so-called connotation, i.e. how is said what is said, has often a big relevance in the discourse. This is what happens, for example, with poetical texts: they are bearers of additional semiotic burden represented by metrics, rhymes and the strophic structure. Indeed, the poetical features of the text are as much meaningful as the literal meaning of the words, but are located at a completely different semiotic level.

Also, the philosophy of language of Paul GRICE (1981) is worth of a mention, since this author revealed the importance for the communication of implicit knowledge that the speakers infer from the observation of the communicative process (discourse implicatures) and from some general assumptions about the human semiotic behavior (conversational maxims). With Grice's conceptual framework in mind we are able to explain how do the humans communicate so much with so few words.

 

Thursday, 02 February 2012 09:43

Nordic Translation Conference 2013


Nordic Translation Conference 2013

Call for Papers

 


The second Nordic Translation Conference will take place on 4, 5, and 6 April 2013 at the University of East Anglia, in Norwich, England.

This quinquennial event is solely dedicated to the particular challenges and pleasures of translating between and among the Nordic countries, which are often closely related culturally, if not always linguistically. It is open to academics, students, translators, publishers, and others who work with the Nordic languages. The first such conference took place in London at the Institute of Germanic and Romance Studies in 2008 and it resulted in the book Northern Lights: Translation in the Nordic Countries (Peter Lang, 2009).

The keynote speakers in 2013 will include Andrew Chesterman, Riitta Oittinen, and Anna Mauranen. As in 2008, there will be workshops, talks, panels, and dual-language readings. Both academics and practising translators are encouraged to attend and present at the conference.

The conference will look at literary and non-literary translation of all kinds, including interpreting and subtitling, both between various Nordic languages and also between English and the Nordic languages. Nordic here includes Danish, Faroese, Finnish, Greenlandic, Icelandic, Norwegian, any of the Sámi dialects, and Swedish. Topics can include, but are not limited to, specific linguistic issues involved in translation/interpretation between two or more languages, analysis of particular texts/genres, professional issues, translating texts by or about minority groups, the translator/interpreter's role, and the effect of cultural similarities/differences among Nordic countries.

In addition, the conference will include several workshops on relevant topics, such as working with specific languages or kinds of texts, using computer tools, finding reference materials, and so on. Those interested in running workshops are also invited to submit proposals.

Please send proposals (250-400 words) for workshops by 1 June 2012 and for conference papers by 15 August 2012 to B.J. Epstein and Gudrun Rawoens by e-mail at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. or by regular mail to B.J. Epstein at the School of Literature, Drama and Creative Writing, University of East Anglia, Norwich Research Park, Norwich, England, NR4 7TJ. Along with the proposal, please include a brief biographical note.

Conference details are available at http://www.nordictranslation.net. For ease of communication, English should be the primary conference language.

The School of Modern Languages and Cultures is seeking an exceptional individual who combines internationally leading research and innovation with an outstanding record in student education for the position of Chair in Corpus Linguistics, as part of a £23m investment in academic leadership at the University of Leeds.

Translation and Literary Studies

Homage to Marilyn Gaddis Rose

Edited by Marella Feltrin-Morris, Deborah Folaron and María Constanza Guzmán

 

ISBN 978-1-905763-34-4, £22.50 (inc. postage and packing)

 

Published January 2012, 138 pages

 

https://www.stjerome.co.uk/books/b/157/

 

 

By nature a transdisciplinary area of inquiry, translation lends itself to being investigated at its intersection with other fields of study. Translation and Literary Studies seeks to highlight the manifold connections between translation and notions of gender, dialectics, agency, philosophy and power. The volume also offers a timely homage to renowned translation theorist Marilyn Gaddis Rose, who was at the forefront of the group of scholars who initiated and helped to institutionalize translation studies. Inspired by Gaddis Rose’s work, and particularly by her concept of stereoscopic reading, the volume is dynamically complementary to the burgeoning contemporary field of global comparative literature, underscoring the diversity of critical literary thought and theory worldwide.

Arranged thematically around questions of translation as literary and cultural criticism, as epistemology, and as poetics and politics, and dealing with works within and beyond the Western tradition, the essays in the volume illustrate the multi-voiced spectrum of literary translation studies today.

 

Friday, 27 January 2012 10:15

PhD Summer School in Translation Studies

PhD Summer School

The PhD Summer School in Translation Studies, now in its fourth edition, is organised by the Department of Translation and Interpreting of the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. This week-long summer school aims at promoting quality research by encouraging the exchange of ideas and experiences amongst young researchers and providing a forum within which students and lecturers can share interests and experiences.

The PhD Summer School offers seminars, workshops and tutorials with internationally renowned academics. It is open to postgraduate students from all over the world seeking to further their studies at MA, PhD or postdoctoral level.

Dates: 25 - 29 June 2012.

Languages: Catalan, Spanish and English.

For further information, please contact the PhD Summer School Coordinator: Dr. Anna Matamala (This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.)

Website: http://jornades.uab.cat/escola_doctorat/en

The PhD Summer School has been co-funded by the Spanish "Ministerio de Educación Cultura y Deporte" (ref. MHE2011-00170).

 

 


Wednesday, 25 January 2012 21:42

Translation-Driven Corpora by Federico Zanettin

Translation Practices Explained Volume 14

Translation-Driven Corpora

Corpus Resources for Descriptive and Applied Translation Studies

 

Federico Zanettin


244 pages, 2012. ISBN 978-1-905763-29-0 (pbk), £30 (including postage and packing, and DVD)

Electronic texts and text analysis tools have opened up a wealth of opportunities to higher education and language service providers, but learning to use these resources continues to pose challenges to scholars and professionals alike. Translation-Driven Corpora aims to introduce readers to corpus tools and methods which may be used in translation research and practice.  Each chapter focuses on specific aspects of corpus creation and use. An introduction to corpora and overview of applications of corpus linguistics methodologies to translation studies is followed by a discussion of corpus design and acquisition. Different stages and tools involved in corpus compilation and use are outlined, from corpus encoding and annotation to indexing and data retrieval, and the various methods and techniques that allow end users to make sense of corpus data are described. The volume also offers detailed guidelines for the construction and analysis of multilingual corpora.

Corpus creation and use are illustrated through practical examples and case studies, with each chapter outlining a set of tasks aimed at guiding researchers, students and translators to practice some of the methods and use some of the resources discussed. These tasks are meant as hands-on activities to be carried out using the materials and links available in an accompanying DVD. Suggested further readings at the end of each chapter are complemented by an extensive bibliography at the end of the volume.

Translation-Driven Corpora is designed for use by teachers and students in the classroom or by researchers and professionals for self-learning. It is an invaluable resource for anyone interested in this fast growing area of scholarly and professional activity.

Federico Zanettin is Associate Professor of English Language and Translation at the University of Perugia. He is the editor of Comics in Translation (2008), and co-editor of Corpora in Translator Education (2003). He is also co-editor of the online translation studies journal inTRAlinea and of the Translation Studies Abstracts Online database.

Contents:

 

List of figures and tables
Acknowledgements


1. Introduction
1.1 Book outline
1.2 How to use the DVD


2. Corpus linguistics and translation studies
2.1 A typology of translation-driven corpora
2.2 Corpus-based translation research
2.2.1 Regularities of translations
2.2.1.1 Simplification
2.2.1.2 Explicitation
2.2.1.3 Standardization
2.2.1.4 Translation of unique items
2.2.1.5 Untypical collocations
2.2.1.6 Interference
2.2.2 Regularities of translators
2.2.3 Regularities of languages
2.2.4 Learner translation corpora
2.2.5 Interpreting and multimodal corpora
2.3 Corpus-based translation teaching and learning
2.4 Computer-assisted translation and computational linguistics
2.5 Tasks
2.5.1 Experimenting with the TEC
2.5.2 Experimenting with COMPARA
2.5.3 Experimenting with the LTC
2.6 Further reading


3. Corpus design and acquisition
3.1 Corpus design
3.1.1 Size
3.1.2 Composition
3.1.3 Representativeness and comparability
3.1.4 Case study: the CEXI corpus
3.2 Corpus acquisition and copyright
3.3 Web corpora
3.3.1 The Web as corpus
3.3.2 The Web as a source of corpora
3.3.2.1 General Web corpora
3.3.2.2 Specialized Web corpora
3.4 Conclusions
3.5 Tasks
3.5.1 Corpus building project outline
3.5.2 Manual creation of a DIY monolingual corpus
3.5.3 Automatic creation of a DIY bilingual comparable corpus
3.6 Further reading


4. Corpus encoding and annotation
4.1 Corpus-based translation studies and corpus annotation
4.2 Annotation for descriptive translation studies
4.2.1 Documentary information
4.2.2 Structural information
4.2.3 Text-linguistic information
4.3 Stand-off annotation
4.4 Conclusions
4.5 Tasks
4.5.1 Creating an XML TEI document
4.5.2 Adding a simple header
4.5.3 Marking-up text structure
4.5.4 Adding linguistic annotation
4.5.5 Indexing the corpus
4.5.6 Searching the corpus
4.6 Further reading


5. Corpus tools and corpus analysis
5.1 Corpus creation and analysis tools
5.1.1 Text acquisition
5.1.2 Annotation
5.1.3 Corpus management and query systems
5.1.4 Data retrieval and display
5.2 Analysis of corpus data
5.2.1 Wordlists and basic statistics
5.2.2 Concordances
5.2.3 Collocations, clusters and clouds
5.2.4 Colligations and word profiles
5.2.5 Semantic associations
5.3 Conclusions
5.4 Tasks
5.4.1 Wordlists
5.4.2 Lists of lemmas
5.4.3 Keywords
5.4.4 Concordances
5.4.5 Collocations and clusters
5.4.6 Word profiles
5.5 Further reading and software


6. Creating multilingual corpora
6.1 Corpus acquisition
6.1.1 Comparable corpora
6.1.2 Parallel corpora
6.2 Alignment
6.2.1 Paragraphs and sentences
6.2.2 Approaches and tools
6.3 Case study: the OPUS corpus
6.4 Parallel corpora and translation memories
6.5 Alignment below sentence level
6.5.1 Alignment of comparable corpora
6.5.2 Word alignment
6.6 Tasks
6.6.1 Aligning a text pair
6.6.2 A parallel corpus of literary texts
6.6.3 Corpus creation checklist
6.7 Further reading and software


7. Using multilingual corpora
7.1 Comparable and parallel corpora
7.2 Display and analysis of parallel corpora
7.3 Case study: The Rushdie English-Italian parallel corpus
7.4 Case study: the OPUS Word alignment database
7.5 Multilingual corpora in translator training and practice
7.6 Tasks
7.6.1 Searching a parallel corpus of literary texts
7.6.2 Exploring the Europarl multilingual corpus
7.7 Further reading


8. Conclusions


References
Index


Call for papers: Translation, Encounter and Global Semiotics
Round Table nos. 27
Special panel at the 11th World Congress of the International Association for Semiotic Studies, Nanjing, China (5-9 October 2012)

Panel organizers:

Pirjo Kukkonen  (University of Helsinki, Finland)
This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Susan Petrilli (University of Bari Aldo Moro, Italy)
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Zhiting Zhang (College of Foreign Languages, Nankai University)
This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Zhijun Yan (School of Foreign Languages & Cultures, Nanjing Normal University, China)
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Translation, Encounter and Global Semiotics

The question of translation concerns the relation among texts in different languages, interlingual translation. A particularly interesting issue from this point of view is the question of the relation established between the original text and the target translation, or "translatant". These texts are similar and yet different. The paradox of translation is that the text must remain the same, while becoming other insofar as it is reorganized into the expressive modalities of another language. The translation is simultaneously identical and different, the same/other. This relation among texts is also reflected in the relation between author and translator.

But translational processes cannot be reduced to interlingual translation alone. The question of translation is far broader. Every time there is a sign process there is translation. Translation concerns the relation among signs, which are intersign and transign relations, and extend in the direction of both intralingual and intersemiotic translative processes.
To extend the notion of translation to the point that translation and semiosis converge means to look at the relation among signs from a special angle. This relation viewed in terms of translative processes is dominated by similarity. The question of translation is connected with the typology of signs, where the sign that prevails is the iconic as distinguished from the indexical and the symbolic. But to posit that translation and semiosis coincide also means to view translation from the point of view of global semiotics and its role in the great semiotic web that is our biosphere.
As intersign and transign activity, the question of translation is also the question of the relation among different fields of knowledge and experience, among different disciplines, different cultures and ideologies, among different philosophies and worldviews. From this point of view, the question of translation is connected to the question of dialogue, otherness and responsibility, therefore to the proposal of a new form of humanism, that is, the humanism of otherness.
Translation is inherent in all communication, understanding and interpretive processes, in language and culture at large. From a global semiotic perspective, if we accept the axiom posited by Thomas A. Sebeok that life and semiosis converge, then translation is the condition for signs to flourish, the condition for life throughout the entire biosphere, the global semiosphere. With specific reference to the anthroposemiosphere and to the theme of our conference "Global Semiotics: Bridging Different Civilizations," encounter and dialogue among cultures and civilizations is only possible thanks to ongoing translational processes.

Papers are invited to address these problems and others still related to the topic of the relation between translational processes and sign processes, therefore between translation theory and sign theory.

Please send abstracts of no more than 500 words in Rich Text Format or Word doc attached to an email and addressed to the panel organizers by 30 June 2012.

A maximum of 15 to 20 minutes will be allowed for each presentation.

For further information concerning abstract submission, see attachment nos. 3.

For registration details, see attachment nos. 2. For general information concerning the Congress and Call for Papers, see attachment 4.

Main Congress website: <http://www.semio2012.com/>http://www.semio2012.com/

Monday, 23 January 2012 09:53

Representations of Discourse

Call for papers

 

The School of Language and Communication Studies at the University of East Anglia invites you to a one-day postgraduate conference, to be held at the University of East Anglia on Friday 8th June 2012. The theme of the conference is ‘representations of discourse’. This theme to be understood broadly and submissions relating to a wide variety of linguistic aspects of the theme are welcome.

 

Possible topics of presentations include:

  • all aspects of translation and interpreting
  • semantic or pragmatic approaches to reported discourse, including relevance-theoretic perspectives
  • discourse analysis and reported discourse, for example critical discourse analytical approaches to discourse representation
  •  representations of discourse across media, for example film and television

The plenary speakers will be Prof Andreas Musolff from the University of East Anglia and Dr Christopher Hart from the University of Northumbria. The conference will end with a roundtable discussion for delegates, in which the two plenary speakers and three non-academic professionals will participate and offer their diverse insights into issues which have been raised. For further details please visit http://www.uea.ac.uk/lcs/eventsnews/discourse


Abstracts of not more than 250 words for oral presentations (fifteen minutes in duration plus five minutes of questions) and posters are invited. The deadline for receipt of abstracts is Monday 12th March 2012. All abstracts will be peer-reviewed anonymously.

 

Guidelines for formatting your abstract

  • Abstracts should be no more than 250 words (excluding references). Text alignment: justified
  • Title text: Calibri, 12pt, bold, centred
  • Body text: Calibri, 12pt
  • Do not indent paragraphs, but leave one empty line between them.

Guidelines for submitting your abstract

  • You must send two copies of your abstract
  • Please indicate whether you wish to give an oral presentation or present a poster by putting "poster" or "oral presentation" in the header of both copies of your abstract.
  • One copy must not mention your name or affiliation, and should be saved as yourname_anon.doc or yourname_anon.docx (for example joebloggs_anon.docx).
  • The other copy must have your name and affiliation in the footer. It should be saved as yourname_named.doc or yourname_named.docx.
  • Attach your abstracts to an email.
  • The subject line of the email should be “abstract submission”.
  • Submissions should be sent to representations no later than Monday 12th March 2012. No late submissions will be accepted.

International Conference
TRANSLATING FIGURATIVE LANGUAGE / TRADURRE FIGURE
Bologna, 12-14 December 2012

 

Organisation
CeSLiC – Department of Modern Foreign Languages and Literatures, University of Bologna
In collaboration with ILLE (EA 4363), Université de Haute-Alsace (France)
Conference Convenors:
Donna R. Miller (donnarose.miller AT unibo.it)
Enrico Monti (e.monti AT unibo.it)

Confirmed Plenary Speakers:
Stefano Arduini (University of Urbino, Italy)
Zoltán Kövecses (Eötvös Loránd University, Hungary)
Gerard Steen (Vrij Universiteit Amsterdam, The Netherlands)
(abstracts online at conference site)

Conference Venue:
Alma Mater Studiorum - Università di Bologna
Aula Prodi, Piazza S. Giovanni in Monte 2, 40124 Bologna (Italy)
Conference Website:
http://www.lingue.unibo.it/tradurrefigure

The conference aims at investigating issues related to the interlingual translation of figurative language.
Figurative language can be said to foreground the complexities of the translation process, as well as the strong link between language and culture that this process has to renegotiate. Metaphors, similes, metonyms, synecdoche, hyperboles and personifications are figures of speech which, far from being peculiar to literary discourse, have stylistic and cognitive functions in different types of discourse. We need only think of the importance of metaphor in scientific models, of hyperbole in advertising, metonymy in journalism, simile and metaphor in political speeches and touristic texts. Besides making different types of discourse livelier and more expressive, these figures of speech allow us to elaborate new concepts by creating analogies with concrete or known terms. They are also able to forge a privileged relationship between addresser and addressee, based on their shared background of linguistic and cultural references. On a structural level, the same thing can be said for what Halliday (1985; 1994) defines as "grammatical metaphor", which transposes the metaphorical
process to the structural level, where meanings are often expressed in less-congruent, i.e. metaphorical, ways.
Translating figurative language invariably implies translating the culture which produced that language, if we allow that any language-culture lives by its metaphors (Bildfeld in Weinrich's terms) and that those metaphors are far from being universal. Lakoff and Johnson (1980) convincingly argue that our linguistic metaphors are often the byproduct of a deeper analogical mental structure, which allows us to know and define the world around us in terms of what we know better.
It is precisely this density of linguistic and cultural factors in figurative language which proves so challenging in the passage from one language to another: it is not by chance that some scholars (Dagut 1976; Broeck 1981) locate figurative language at the limits of translatability, if not beyond. Translators have the task of adapting the world-view which has produced these instances of figurative language into the cultural paradigm and thus beliefs and values of the target-culture, and to do so while preserving that combination of force and levity which is a prerogative of figurative language.
This of course implies that the translator has first to establish priorities among the different functions that figurative language plays in the source text, and the associations that such images can activate in the mind of the reader. This must be done before choosing which of these to privilege in the not-so-rare cases of asymmetry between the two language-cultures involved. One may think for example of the difficulty of translating the catachreses of one language – metaphors once original and now more or less dormant as they have become part of everyday language – once they are re-activated in some specific poetic or ludic context, as quite often happens in literature, as well as, for instance, in journalism and advertising.
The conference is open to all language pairs and to various approaches to the issue: be they linguistic and/or literary, cognitive and/or stylistic, interdisciplinary, corpus-based, etc. Proposals dealing with statistical translation software and/or translation memories are also of interest. We welcome theoretical and/or case studies, focusing on the translation of different registers/ genres: from literature to politics, from advertising to science, from jokes to films, and so on.

A volume including a peer-reviewed selection of articles (in English and Italian) will be published in 2013. The selection and reviewing process will be handled by the scientific committee of the conference. The book, edited by Enrico Monti and Donna R. Miller, will be published online in the collection Quaderni del Ceslic (AMS Acta - Università di Bologna), and a paper version is scheduled to follow in 2014. We hope that the conference and the volume coming out of it will offer an important contribution to a domain in translation studies which is still awaiting systematic exploration.

Proposals for papers are invited for consideration and should be submitted no later than 15 April 2012

The conference languages are English and Italian. We foresee each presenter having a 30 minute slot: 20 minutes for the presentation + 10 minutes for discussion.
Abstracts should be approximately 250 words, excluding key references. They should contain a concise statement of the aim of the contribution, as well as provide a description of the main part of the presentation and key references.

Proposers are invited to send one .doc or .rtf or .odt file, which includes:
1) Presenter(s) name(s), affiliation(s) and contact email address(es)
2) Title of proposal, 3-5 keywords, and abstract with references
to the conference convenors at: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

All proposals must be submitted by 15 April 2012. An acknowledgement will be sent back to you as soon as possible.
Abstracts will go through blind peer-review by members of the Scientific Committee. Notification of acceptance will be given by 15 June 2012 and registration/payment will open immediately afterwards.

Conference fees: 80 euros (fees include 2 lunches, 5 coffee breaks, conference materials)
Social dinner (optional): 30 euros

Detailed information on registration and payment will be provided on the conference website by June 15, 2012.

Monday, 16 January 2012 16:19

Handbook of Translation Studies Volume 2

Handbook of Translation Studies
Volume 2
Edited by Yves Gambier and Luc van Doorslaer
University of Turku / Lessius University College, Antwerp; CETRA, University of Leuven
ISBN 978 90 272 0332 8 | EUR 90.00 | USD 135.00

As a meaningful manifestation of how institutionalized the discipline has become, the new Handbook of Translation Studies is most welcome. It joins the other signs of maturation such as Summer Schools, the development of academic curricula, historical surveys, journals, book series, textbooks, terminologies, bibliographies and encyclopedias.
The HTS aims at disseminating knowledge about translation and interpreting and providing easy access to a large range of topics, traditions, and methods to a relatively broad audience: not only students who often adamantly prefer such user-friendliness, researchers and lecturers in Translation Studies, Translation & Interpreting professionals; but also scholars and experts from other disciplines (among which linguistics, sociology, history, psychology). In addition the HTS addresses any of those with a professional or personal interest in the problems of translation, interpreting, localization, editing, etc., such as communication specialists, journalists, literary critics, editors, public servants, business managers, (intercultural) organization specialists, media specialists, marketing professionals.
Moreover, The HTS offers added value. First of all, it is the first Handbook with this scope in Translation Studies that has both a print edition and an online version. The advantages of an online version are obvious: it is more flexible and accessible, and in addition, the entries can be regularly revised and updated. The Handbook is variously searchable: by article, by author, by subject.
A second benefit is the interconnection with the selection and organization principles of the online Translation Studies Bibliography (TSB). The taxonomy of the TSB has been partly applied to the selection of entries for the HTS. Moreover, many items in the reference lists are hyperlinked to the TSB, where the user can find an abstract of a publication.
All articles (between 500 and 6000 words) are written by specialists in the different subfields and are peer-reviewed.
Last but not least, the usability, accessibility and flexibility of the HTS depend on the commitment of people who agree that Translation Studies does matter. All users are therefore invited to share their feedback. Any questions, remarks and suggestions for improvement can be sent to the editorial team at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

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