The Translator’s Constrained Mediation in Trans-Editing of News
Texts Narrating Political Conflicts

Yamei Chen
National Taipei University of Technology

News organisations are socially, economically and politically situated, so news texts are inevitably produced from certain perspectives, be they social, cultural or political. To meet the expectations and interests of the target audience, news translators usually need to customise source news texts in terms of the receiving perspectives. Trans-editing can assist news translators in achieving such a need of adaptation through various trans-editing strategies. This kind of translator’s mediation is not totally at random but systematic and norm-governed by various contextual factors. Some previous studies have already adopted empirical news data to illustrate how the news translator’s mediation is influenced by contextual factors. Nevertheless, there are two aspects that have thus far rarely been explored: (1) the impacts of contextual factors on the translator’s mediation on the overall structures of news items, and (2) the constraints on the translator’s mediation imposed by the interplay of different contextual factors. Accordingly, this paper carries out a case study on trans-editing of news texts narrating political conflicts to address these inadequacies.
The data examined in the case study cover some news texts about U.S. arms sales to Taiwan from the New York Times and the Washington Post, and their trans-edited Chinese versions from the China Times and the Commercial Times in Taiwan. To explore the translator’s constrained mediation, the source and target news texts are compared and contrasted in the light of their relevant contextual factors and overall news structures (both schematic and semantic). By examining the underlying reasons behind the regular shifts in the target news structures, this paper makes clear how the news translator’s mediation is systematically governed by the Taiwanese government’s political policies, the target newspapers’ audience design and the trans-editing conventions in Taiwan’s journalistic culture.

Company websites, genre conventions and the role of the translator

David Limon
Department of Translation, Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana

                       
These days, all companies that are concerned with their image have a website that is likely to include, among other things, a company presentation, vision and mission statement. The form and content of these sites is heavily influenced by Anglo-American models, and yet the relevant genre conventions have still not become globally standardised, due to cultural differences ranging from general text conventions to the differing histories of the societies in which these companies function. A particularly interesting example is that of countries in Central and Eastern Europe that made the transition to a free-market economy less than two decades ago and are now striving to 'catch up' with their longer-established West European competitors. In the country on which I shall focus, Slovenia, it has become standard for these websites to be translated into English to meet the needs of the wider non-Slovene audience – including speakers of German, Italian, French and the Slavic languages spoken in the region. The way the texts are written and translated raises interesting questions about both cultural transfer and the role of the translator in the globalised, online age. These include: the problems involved in identifying the target audience and target culture in web-based communication; the growing role of English as a lingua franca within Europe, in spite of the European Union's policy of multiligualism; and the apparent cultural hegemony of Anglo-American models of business communication. There is also the issue of whether, in the situation discussed, the translator is functioning as an expert in text formation and an intercultural mediator, or rather as a language specialist involved in a more constrained linguistic transfer.

 Identifying and translating irony across cultures

Eliana Terminiello
University of Napoli - Federico II

Emerging as an approach to life, in which the ironist adopts an attitude of scepticism and mistrust in relation to everyday language (Colebrook 2004), irony can be considered a peculiar aspect of daily conversation and, as Gibbs and Colston (2001: 187-200) aptly remark, it “[…] is particularly useful in conveying both humorous and hostile attitudes in everyday communication” and it is elicited mostly via implicatures and inferences (Attardo 2001).
Much of the research on irony has focused on the rhetorical use of it in literature and poetry (Byron, 1972), written and spoken language (Anolli, Ciceri and Infantino: 2002) or in relation to humour (Chiaro, 2006). Since irony is subjective and pervasive in language, this work aims to build up an objective framework that can contribute to its identification in conversational settings in a more systematic way. Another research question concerns its usage across cultures, namely English and Italian.
In order to carry out this analysis I have chosen 10 different American and British films from different genres and some selected ironic exchanges have been investigated. The comparative analysis between the English and the Italian version has taken into account Pavesi’s (2005) and Malone’s (1988) strategies even though, translation strategies do not constitute one of the purposes of my research, but only a means which help the investigation of the transposition of the Language Devices which convey irony from a language to another. In other words, these strategies allow me to shed light on the cultural factors which are behind the choices of the elements for translating irony. Contrastively speaking, in ironic contexts exaggeration seems to be more pervasive in Italian than in English in line with the cultural orientations outlined by Katan (1999).

Towards an “activist” translation pedagogy

Federica Scarpa
SSLMIT (University of Trieste)

Translations are carried out in every area of human knowledge, which makes the study of translations interdisciplinary by its very nature. However, from a more research-oriented perspective, the interdisciplinary nature of translation has meant that different approaches developed in other disciplines (linguistics, language teaching, literary studies, cognitive psychology, cultural studies, business etc.) have been applied to the study of translations, contributing to the complex interdiscipline of Translation Studies (TS). The scholars belonging to these different perspectives have often had communication problems which are due to a basic lack of homogeneity of their research methodologies and the terminology they use. Thus the interdisciplinarity of translation has sometimes come to mean that TS is less an autonomous discipline and more a “federation” of different subdisciplines. However laudable, the attempt of finding common ground between these different approaches by Andrew Chesterman and Rosemary Arrojo (2000) was based on the premise that two main paradigms could be identified, an empirical-descriptive approach (represented by Chesterman) and a postmodernist approach oriented towards cultural studies and textual theories (represented by Arrojo).
With special reference to a pedagogy of scientific and technical translation aiming at building a professional competence in the students, this article argues that this dichotomy is not “delicate” enough because it lumps together in the empirical-descriptive paradigm at least three very different ways of approaching the study of translation: the linguist’s, the professional translator’s and the translation scholar’s. It will be further argued that in a university-level specialist-translation course all three approaches should be present and that, based on James Holmes’ two paradigms of Descriptive Translation Studies (DTS) and Applied Translation Studies (ATS), the teacher/scholar has the moral responsibility to both describe and prescribe. Following Tymoczko’s (2000) “activist translation” model and Ulrych’s (1999) “evidence-based approach”, an “activist translation pedagogy” to professional specialist translation is proposed, where the task of the teacher is seen as getting actively involved in presenting the students with descriptive norms based on solid empirical evidence but in a critical and, ultimately, prescriptive way, i.e. also offering a practical solution to translation problems (see Scarpa 2008, pp. 77-82).

From La donna che visse due volte to  Se mi lasci ti cancello: film titles as a key element for the success of foreign films in Italy

Francesco Zippel
University of Salento
 
Titling has always been a primary and controversial issue for a foreign film in order to be successful on the Italian film market. On their way to the box office many films have been influenced by how the original title was translated into Italian. The core meaning of the films was sometimes enriched, other times misplaced, turning it into something completely different for the audience. From Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo to Michel Gondry’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, the titling process has also been influenced by marketing and dubbing issues.
This paper, then, will analyse the extent to which the film title itself has affected the way Italian filmgoers choose to watch one foreign film instead of another, which in turn decides the fate of the film.