IATIS News

Children’s Literature in Translation: Texts and Contexts edited by Jan Van Coillie and Jack McMartin has been published open-access by Leuven University Press. Digital versions are available on OAPEN and JSTOR This volume focuses on the complex interplay that happens between text and context when works of children’s literature are translated. What contexts of production and reception account for how translated children’s books come to be made and read as they are? How are translated children’s books adapted to suit the context of a new culture? Spanning the disciplines of Children’s Literature Studies and Translation Studies, this book brings together established and emerging voices to provide an overview of the analytical, empirical and geographic richness of current research in this field and to identify and reflect on common insights, analytical perspectives and trajectories for future interdisciplinary research. This volume will appeal to an interdisciplinary audience of scholars and students in Translation Studies and Children’s Literature Studies and related disciplines. It has a broad geographic and cultural scope, with contributions dealing with translated children’s literature in the United Kingdom, the United States, Ireland, Spain, France, Brazil, Poland, Slovenia, Hungary, China, the former Yugoslavia, Sweden, Germany, and Belgium.

Edited by Veljka Ruzicka Kenfel and Juliane House This book comprises studies on death in Spanish, British/American and German children’s literature, cinema and audiovisual fiction; several translations from English and German into Spain are analysed. References to death were censored in Spain, as they were omitted or softened not to traumatise young readers. However, in the last twenty years, this taboo theme has been included to enable children and young adults to overcome the loss of a loved one as a necessary part of growing up. Contributions to this book show the historical development of this topic in different films and literary genres following, among others, a fantasy-mythological approach or a realist and objective one, helping children and young adults face death maturely and constructively. For more information, click here

By Leah Gerber and Lintao Qi This book delves into the Chinese literary translation landscape over the last century, spanning critical historical periods such as the Cultural Revolution in the greater China region.　 Contributors from all around the world approach this theme from various angles, providing an overview of translation phenomena at key historical moments, identifying the trends of translation and publication, uncovering the translation history of important works, elucidating the relationship between translators and other agents, articulating the interaction between texts and readers and disclosing the nature of literary migration from Chinese into English. This volume aims at benefiting both academics of translation studies from a dominantly Anglophone culture and researchers in the greater China region. Chinese scholars of translation studies will not only be able to cite this as a reference book, but will be able to discover contrasts, confluence and communication between academics across the globe, which will stimulate, inspire and transform discussions in this field. For more information, click here

This book sheds new light on translation competence and its development. After reviewing recent theoretical and empirical perspectives, the author presents the methodology and results of one of few comprehensive, longitudinal, combined process/product studies of translation competence acquisition, which has cognitive and pedagogical implications. Carried out among translation students with varying levels of foreign language proficiency before and after their first 7.5 months of translator education, the study investigates translation product quality, the strategicness of the translation process, the strategicness of external resource use, and translation principles. It also examines perceived translation difficulty and quality as well as the impact of directionality and foreign language proficiency. For more information, click here

Guest editors: Jie Zhang and Jia Li Multilingual crisis communication has emerged as a global challenge during the COVID-19 pandemic. Global public health communication is characterized by the large-scale exclusion of linguistic minorities from timely high-quality information. The severe limitations of multilingual crisis communication that the COVID-19 crisis has laid bare result from the dominance of English-centric global mass communication; the longstanding devaluation of minoritized languages; and the failure to consider the importance of multilingual repertoires for building trust and resilient communities. These challenges, along with possible solutions, are explored in greater detail by the articles brought together in this special issue, which present case studies from China and the global Chinese diaspora. As such, the special issue constitutes not only an exploration of the sociolinguistics of the COVID-19 crisis but also a concerted effort to open a space for intercultural dialogue within sociolinguistics. We close by contending that, in order to learn lessons from COVID-19 and to be better prepared for future crises, sociolinguistics needs to include local knowledges and grassroots practices not only as objects of investigation but in its epistemologies; needs to diversify its knowledge base and the academic voices producing that knowledge base; and needs to re-enter dialogue with policy makers and activists. For more information, click here

Edited by: Carmen Valero-Garcés. For more information, click here

Edited by: Roberto A. Valdeón and Youbin Zhao. For more information, click here

The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Activism provides an accessible, diverse and ground-breaking overview of literary, cultural, and political translation across a range of activist contexts. As the first extended collection to offer perspectives on translation and activism from a global perspective, this handbook includes case studies and histories of oppressed and marginalised people from over twenty different languages. The contributions will make visible the role of translation in promoting and enabling social change, in promoting equality, in fighting discrimination, in supporting human rights, and in challenging autocracy and injustice across the Middle East, Africa, Latin America, East Asia, the US and Europe. With a substantial introduction, thirty-one chapters, and an extensive bibliography, this Handbook is an indispensable resource for all activists, translators, students and researchers of translation and activism within translation and interpreting studies.

This non-thematic issue has been prepared in the unprecedented times of COVID-19 pandemic which has affected the academia all around the world and made us move to distance teaching, assessment and research. I wish to thank our contributors for high-quality work and our JoSTras team for their dedication and unfailing support despite adverse circumstances. We have received as many as 47 submissions for the July 2020 issue of JoSTrans and, after a rigorous peer review process, we selected nine papers for publication. They were grouped into three thematic sections spanning various subfields of Translation and Interpreting Studies: (1) Spotlight on research methods; (2) Interpreting and sight translation, and (3) Technologies and accessibility. It is particularly pleasing to see a growing number of contributions which explore methodological aspects of research into specialised translation. The methodological section comprises three papers: by Chuan Yu on a researcher’s identities in digital ethnography, by Erik Angelone on screen recording as a diagnostic protocol to improve consistency in process-oriented assessment, and by Feng Pan, Kyung Hye Kim and Tao Li on a combination of parallel corpus methods with critical discourse analysis to investigate political translation. The interpreting section features Randi Havnen’s paper on how a change of mode in sight translation affects meaning-making, Sijia Chen’s study into the impact of directionality on consecutive interpreting, and Xiangyu Wang and Xiangdong Li’s survey of Chinese job ads for in-house interpreters. The last section focuses, not surprisingly, on our popular topic of technologies and accessibility. Rudy Loock applies corpus methods to identify machine-translationese to empower novice translators, Irene Tor-Carroggio carries out a reception study on audio description in China while Estella Oncins and Pilar Orero present an integrated approach to accessibility services. Last but not least, we have nine book reviews and an interview with Carol Robertson on the early days of subtitling at the BBC, conducted by Lindsay Bywood. For more information, click here

The Readers of Multiperspectives in Analysis and corpus design will find nine selected peer reviewed and original contributions which deal with key aspects in recent trends in corpus linguistics: the developments in corpus design, compilation procedures and annotation, and the different analytical perspectives in which corpus techniques have become a core empirical methodology, either in isolation, or combined with other approaches that help reinforce arguments. It will be found that, in most of the articles, the authors themselves have compiled their own study corpus. Consequently, as it is customary in Corpus Linguistics research, a justification of the compilation procedure (e.g. sampling parameters or representativeness) is part and parcel of the discussion. The research areas to which corpus linguistics has been successfully applied in this volume include historical linguistics, linguistic variation, discourse analysis, computational linguistics and translation. For more information, click here

The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Cognition provides a comprehensive, state-of-the-art overview of how translation and cognition relate to each other, discussing the most important issues in the fledgling sub-discipline of Cognitive Translation Studies (CTS), from foundational to applied aspects. With a strong focus on interdisciplinarity, the handbook surveys concepts and methods in neighbouring disciplines that are concerned with cognition and how they relate to translational activity from a cognitive perspective. Looking at different types of cognitive processes, this volume also ventures into emergent areas such as neuroscience, artificial intelligence, cognitive ergonomics and human–computer interaction. With an editors’ introduction and 30 chapters authored by leading scholars in the field of Cognitive Translation Studies, this handbook is the essential reference and resource for students and researchers of translation and cognition and will also be of interest to those working in bilingualism, second-language acquisition and related areas. For more information, click here

This groundbreaking book explores the relevance of queer theory to Translation Studies and of translation to Global Sexuality Studies. Beginning with a comprehensive overview of the origins and evolution of queer theory, this book places queer theory and Translation Studies in a productive and mutually interrogating relationship. After framing the discussion of actual and potential interfaces between queer sexuality and queer textuality, the chapters trace the transnational circulation of queer texts, focusing on the place of translation in "gay" anthologies, the packaging of queer life writing for global audiences, and the translation of lyric poetry as a distinct site of queer performativity. Baer analyzes fictional translators in literature and film, the treatment of translation in historical and ethnographic studies of sexual and linguistic others, the work of queer translators, and the reception of queer texts in translation. Including a range of case studies to exemplify key ethical issues relevant to all scholars of global sexuality and postcolonial studies, this book is essential reading for advanced students, scholars, and researchers in Translation Studies, gender and sexuality studies, and related areas. For more information, click here