IATIS News

Adaptation Special Issue: Intersemiotic Translation as Adaptation, Edited by Vasso Giannakopoulou and Deborah Cartmell Volume 12, Issue 3, December 2019 For more information, click here

Clear and accessible, this textbook provides a step-by-step guide to textual analysis for beginning translators and translation students. Covering a variety of text types, including business letters, recipes, and museum guides in six languages (Chinese, English, French, German, Russian, and Spanish), this book presents authentic, research-based materials to support translation among any of these languages. Translating Texts will provide beginning translators with greater text awareness, a critical skill for professional translators. Including discussions of the key theoretical texts underlying this text-centred approach to translation and sample rubrics for (self) assessment, this coursebook also provides easy instructions for creating additional corpora for other text types and in other languages. Ideal for both language-neutral and language-specific classroom settings, this is an essential text for undergraduate and graduate-level programs in modern languages and translation. For more information, click here

The Midwest, to many Americans, is either “fly-over country” where not much of interest happens, or “the heartland,” nostalgically framed as an ideal, homogenous America. A group of U-M scholars has secured a $225,000 grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to explore the Midwest instead as a multicultural, multilingual region shaped by successive waves of both international and domestic migrations. Focusing on the question of translation — broadly understood as complex mediations and negotiations between languages and cultures — the group of humanities scholars will organize a series of events under the Mellon Foundation’s Sawyer Seminar program. “We’ll be exploring diverse cultures of translation in various Midwestern sites,” said Yopie Prins, Irene H. Butter Collegiate Professor of English and Comparative Literature and chair of the Department of Comparative Literature in LSA. “Who translates what for which purpose and in whose interest? How has the region been defined by the interaction of multilingual communities?” Translation, the scholars stress, is not merely a process between national languages, but an everyday web of encounters among citizens who bring different backgrounds, expectations, fears and dreams to the table. The multidisciplinary U-M team of scholars is led by Prins, who also is a professor of comparative literature, and English language and literature; Marlon James Sales, postdoctoral fellow in critical translation studies; and Silke-Maria Weineck, professor of Germanic languages and literatures, and comparative literature. Collaborators include Kristin Dickinson, assistant professor of Germanic languages and literatures; Maya Barzilai, associate professor of Middle East studies and Judaic studies; Benjamin Paloff, associate professor of comparative literature, and Slavic languages and literatures; and Christi Merrill, associate professor of Asian languages and cultures, and comparative literature. Titled “Sites of Translation in the Multilingual Midwest,” the project will run for two academic years, starting in fall 2020 and culminating with a conference in spring 2022. It will bring together community organizations, as well as researchers and scholars from U-M and other Midwestern universities and colleges for a series of public events and seminars. They will explore topics as diverse as translation initiatives for local communities; U-M archives that preserve histories of translation in the Philippines and Filipino diaspora in Michigan; photojournalism that visualizes interaction among multiple languages in the industrial cities of Detroit and Dortmund; the place of Eastern European literature in Midwestern cultural networks; Yiddish translations of urban experience; the promise of translation networks enabled by Hathi Trust; and the challenges and promises of Hamtramck, Michigan’s most linguistically diverse city. Additional meetings are planned on Native American languages and the role of Arabic communities in the Midwest.   Sawyer Seminars are, in effect, temporary research centers that connect faculty, visiting scholars, postdoctoral fellows and graduate students — mainly in the arts, humanities and social sciences — for intensive study of subjects chosen by the participants. “The recognition of the Mellon Foundation and the intent of this seminar series exemplify the incredible work of U-M faculty members taking an interdisciplinary approach to analyzing multiple histories and practices of translation in the Midwest,” said Martin Philbert, provost and executive vice president for academic affairs. “These events and the conversations that come during them will spark important dialogues about the pivotal role translation plays in today’s multicultural and multilingual society.” It has been a decade since U-M last received the prestigious Sawyer Seminar grant from the foundation’s invitation-only award process. “We are thrilled to be supported by The Mellon Foundation and excited to be given this opportunity to make possible more collaboration with scholars working around issues of translation within and beyond our university,” Prins said. “We see translation not as an academia-led practice of language, but as a community-centered encounter with its own multilingual realities.”

Contra Instrumentalism questions the long-accepted notion that translation reproduces or transfers an invariant contained in or caused by the source text. This “instrumental” model of translation has dominated translation theory and commentary for more than two millennia, and its influence can be seen today in elite and popular cultures, in academic institutions and in publishing, in scholarly monographs and in literary journalism, in the most rarefied theoretical discourses and in the most commonly used clichés. Contra Instrumentalism aims to end the dominance of instrumentalism by showing how it grossly oversimplifies translation practice and fosters an illusion of immediate access to source texts. Lawrence Venuti asserts that all translation is an interpretive act that necessarily entails ethical responsibilities and political commitments. Venuti argues that a hermeneutic model offers a more comprehensive and incisive understanding of translation that enables an appreciation of not only the creative and scholarly aspects of what a translator does but also the crucial role translation plays in the cultural and social institutions that shape human life. For more information, click here

Special Issue on Intersemiotic Translation and Multimodality, edited by Karen Bennett - just out! Translation Matters Vol. 1 No. 2. Available at: https://ojs.letras.up.pt/index.php/tm/issue/view/458

Covers all branches of computational linguistics and language engineering, wherever they incorporate a multilingual aspect. It features papers that cover the theoretical, descriptive or computational aspects of any of the following topics: - compilation and use of bi- and multilingual corpora- computer-aided language instruction and learning- computational implications of non-Roman character sets- connectionist approaches to translation- contrastive linguistics- corpus-based and statistical language modeling- discourse phenomena and their treatment in (human or machine) translation- history of machine translation- human translation theory and practice- knowledge engineering- machine translation and machine-aided translation- minority languages- morphology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics- multilingual dialogue systems- multilingual information retrieval- multilingual information society (sociological and legal as well as linguistic aspects)- multilingual message understanding systems- multilingual natural language interfaces- multilingual text composition and generation- multilingual word-processing- phonetics, phonology- software localization and internationalization- speech processing, especially for speech translation For more information, click here Your article in Machine Translation?Submit online via http://www.editorialmanager.com/coat/

The focus of the corpus-based and corpus-driven study presented in this book is on a supranational institution that has received relatively little attention in linguistic research: the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR). After briefly illustrating the functioning of the ECtHR and its historical development, the first part of the book delves into the Court’s language regime, which consists in the use of only two official languages, i.e. English and French. The linguistic study presented in the second part of the book concerns the presence of Italian national “system-bound elements” (SBEs) in ECtHR case-law. SBEs are elements originally embedded in a legal and judicial system that are recontextualised in a different legal environment. To extract Italian SBEs from a corpus of sixteen ECtHR judgments published in English, an innovative methodology was proposed combining event templates with keywords. This allowed the retrieval of 401 expressions referring to different Italian SBEs, which were analysed in terms of their frequency, distribution, and linguistic form. The study reveals that a variety of national and international sources co-exist in the corpus and that translation plays a fundamental role in the drafting of supranational case-law, which requires the creation of “stipulative corresponding expressions”. For more information, click here

This volume addresses the imperative need for recognizing, exploring, and developing the role of multilingual communication in crisis settings. It is recognized that 'communication is aid' and that access to communication is an undeniable human right in crises. Even where effective and accurate information is available to be distributed, circulated, and broadcast in different ways through an ever-growing array of technologies, too often the language barrier remains in place. From the Philippines to Lebanon via Spain, Italy, Columbia, and the UK, crisis situations occur worldwide, with different cultural reactions and needs everywhere. The contributors of this volume represent a geographical mixture of regions, language combinations, and disciplines, because crisis situations need to be studied in their locale with different methods. Drawing on disaster studies research, this book aims to stimulate a broad, multidisciplinary debate on how complex communication is in cascading crises and on the role translation can play to facilitate communication. Translation in Cascading Crises is a key resource for students and researchers of Translation and Interpreting Studies, Humanitarian Studies, and Disaster Studies.

The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Technology provides a comprehensive and accessible overview of the dynamically evolving relationship between translation and technology. Divided into five parts, with an editor's introduction, this volume presents the perspectives of users of translation technologies, and of researchers concerned with issues arising from the increasing interdependency between translation and technology. The chapters in this Handbook tackle the advent of technologization at both a technical and a philosophical level, based on industry practice and academic research. Containing over 30 authoritative, cutting-edge chapters, this is an essential reference and resource for those studying and researching translation and technology. The volume will also be valuable for translators, computational linguists and developers of translation tools. For more information, click here

Call for Applications for Hong Kong PhD Fellowship Scheme, 2020-21. Established in 2009 by the Hong Kong Research Grants Council (RGC), the Hong Kong PhD Fellowship Scheme aims at attracting the best and brightest students in the world to pursue their PhD programmes in Hong Kong's institutions. The Department of Linguistics and Translation (http://www.cityu.edu.hk/lt), City University of Hong Kong is now inviting applications for the Scheme. The Dept has an exemplary record of teaching excellence and is internationally recognized for its world-class research. The QS (Quacquarelli Symonds) ranking for Linguistics of CityU rose from 47th in 2011 to 32nd in 2019. CityU becomes the top-ranked university in Hong Kong in Linguistics. More than 20 faculty members conduct empirically based and theoretically informed research in the areas of theoretical linguistics, applied linguistics, intelligent linguistics applications, corpus linguistics, computational linguistics, empirical linguistics, translation, interpretation, and translation studies. Application deadline: 2 December 2019 For more details, see here

Routledge Research on Translation and Interpreting History showcases cutting-edge research in English on the interdisciplinary dialogue between translation and interpreting studies and historical perspectives. Building off the emergence of translation and interpreting history as a subdiscipline of the field in its own right, the series features interdisciplinary work spanning a range of cultural and geographical contexts which engages in the treatment of translation and translation practice as social and historical events. Primary research in translation and interpreting history will be explored, as will critical reflections on theoretical and methodological developments and innovations in the field. The series brings together and pushes forward original research in translation and interpreting history, making the series of particular interest to graduate students, researchers, and scholars in translation and interpreting studies, as well as related fields including comparative literature, history, and cultural studies. For more information about the series or to submit a proposal, please contact the editors at: TIHseries@gmail.com.

by Dimitris Asimakoulas   This book examines comic book adaptations of Aristophanes’ plays in order to shed light on how and why humour travels across cultures and time. Forging links between modern languages, translation and the study of comics, it analyses the Greek originals and their English translations and offers a unique, language-led research agenda for cultural flows, and the systematic analysis of textual norms in a multimodal environment. It will appeal to students and scholars of Modern Languages, Translation Studies, Comics Studies, Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature. For more information, visit https://www.palgrave.com/gp/book/9783030195267