Exploring Translation And Multilingual Text Production

The series serves to propagate investigations into language usage, especially with respect to computational support. This includes all forms of text handling activity, not only interlingual translations, but also conversions carried out in response to different communicative tasks. Among the major topics are problems of text transfer and the interplay between human and machine activities.

Translation produces meaningful versions of textual information. But what is a text? What is translation? What is meaning? And what is a translational version? This book On Translating Signs: Exploring Text and Semio-Translation responds to those and other eternal translation-theoretical questions from a semiotic point of view. Dinda L. Gorlée notes that in this world of interpretation and translation, surrounded by our semio-translational universe "perfused with signs," we can intuit whether or not an object in front of us (dis)qualifies as a text. This spontaneous understanding requires no formalized definition in order to "happen" in the receivers of text-signs. The author further observes that translated signs are not only intelligible for target audiences, but also work together as a "theatre of consciousness" or a "theatre of controversy" which the author views as powered by Charles S. Peirce's three categories of Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness. This book presents the virtual community of translators as emotional, dynamical, intellectual but not infallible semioticians. They translate text-signs from one language and culture into another, thus creating an innovative sign-milieu packed with intuitive, dynamic, and changeable signs. Translators produce fleeting and fallible text-translations, with obvious errors caused by ignorance or misguided knowledge. Text-signs are translatable, yet there is no such thing as a perfect or "final" translation. And without the ongoing creating of translated signs of all kinds, there would be no novelty, no vagueness, no manipulation of texts and - for that matter - no semiosis.

This volume presents discourse production in multilingual contexts as a specific type of language contact situation. Translation may be seen as the prototypical type of multilingual discourse production, other types would include parallel text production in different languages (e.g. for websites) or the production of versions more loosely connected with the source text. When divergent communicative norms and conventions come into contact in any of these types of text production, one may find that such conventions transcend established language boundaries, potentially leading to the emergence of new genres. This volume represents the first collection of papers that focus on the specific properties of language contact through multilingual discourse production. It brings together approaches by historical linguists, language contact researchers and translation scholars, thus presenting the topic in its full variety and providing valuable suggestions for further research in this emerging field of study.

The book specifies a corpus architecture, including annotation and querying techniques, and its implementation. The corpus architecture is developed for empirical studies of translations, and beyond those for the study of texts which are inter-lingually comparable, particularly texts of similar registers. The compiled corpus, CroCo, is a resource for research and is, with some copyright restrictions, accessible to other research projects. Most of the research was undertaken as part of a DFG-Project into linguistic properties of translations. Fundamentally, this research project was a corpus-based investigation into the language pair English-German. The long-term goal is a contribution to the study of translation as a contact variety, and beyond this to language comparison and language contact more generally with the language pair English - German as our object languages. This goal implies a thorough interest in possible specific properties of translations, and beyond this in an empirical translation theory. The methodology developed is not restricted to the traditional exclusively system-based comparison of earlier days, where real-text excerpts or constructed examples are used as mere illustrations of assumptions and claims, but instead implements an empirical research strategy involving structured data (the sub-corpora and their relationships to each other, annotated and aligned on various theoretically motivated levels of representation), the formation of hypotheses and their operationalizations, statistics on the data, critical examinations of their significance, and interpretation against the background of system-based comparisons and other independent sources of explanation for the phenomena observed. Further applications of the resource developed in computational linguistics are outlined and evaluated.

The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Methodology provides a comprehensive overview of methodologies in translation studies, including both well-established and more recent approaches. The Handbook is organised into three sections, the first of which covers methodological issues in the two main paradigms to have emerged from within translation studies, namely skopos theory and descriptive translation studies. The second section covers multidisciplinary perspectives in research methodology and considers their application in translation research. The third section deals with practical and pragmatic methodological issues. Each chapter provides a summary of relevant research, a literature overview, critical issues and topics, recommendations for best practice, and some suggestions for further reading. Bringing together over 30 eminent international scholars from a wide range of disciplinary and geographical backgrounds, this Handbook is essential reading for all students and scholars involved in translation methodology and research.

This new volume on language contact and contact languages presents cutting-edge research by distinguished scholars in the field as well as by highly talented newcomers. It has two principal aims: to analyze language contact from different perspectives – notably those of language typology, diachronic linguistics, language acquisition and translation studies; and to describe, explain, and elaborate on universal constraints on language contact. The individual chapters offer systematic comparisons of a wealth of contact situations and the book as a whole makes a valuable contribution to deepening our understanding of contact-induced language change. With its broad approach, this work will be welcomed by scholars of many different persuasions.

This collection features eight interviews with seven senior scholars, whose seminal works involve the application of Systemic Functional Linguistica (SFL) to translation studies have advanced Systemic Functional Translation Studies (SFTS) as a research agenda in its own right, with critical reflections and insights into future directions. The book introduces SFTS as a research field, tracing its development and situating the contributions of the scholars interviewed within this tradition. An international group of researchers working across a diverse range of topics within SFTS are interviewed, including Christian M.I.M. Matthiessen, Erich Steiner, J.R. Martin, Juliane House, Jeremy Munday, Adriana Pagano and Akila Sellami-Baklouti. Taken together, the collection offers a comprehensive account of theoretical and methodological developments in SFTS, with critical overviews of these scholars’ body of work within the research area and reflections on the emerging research that pushes SFTS scholarship into new frontiers. This volume will be of particular interest to scholars in translation studies and Systemic Functional Linguistics, as well as those interested in innovations in linguistic theory.

Translating Tagore’s ‘Stray Birds’ into Chinese explores the choices in poetry translation in light of Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) and illustrates the ways in which readers can achieve a deeper understanding of translated works in English and Chinese. Focusing on Rabindranath Tagore’s ‘Stray Birds’, a collection of elegant and philosophical poems, as a source text, Ma and Wang analyse four Chinese target texts by Zheng Zhenduo, Yao Hua, Lu Jinde and Feng Tang and consider their linguistic complexities through SFL. This book analyses the source text and the target texts from the perspectives of the four strata of language, including graphology, phonology, lexicogrammar and context. Ideal for researchers and academics of SFL, Translation Studies, Linguistics, and Discourse Analysis, Translating Tagore’s ‘Stray Birds’ into Chinese provides an in-depth exploration of SFL and its emerging prominence in the field of Translation Studies.