Translation Archive

PanLex, a project of the Long Now Foundation, is spending this summer at the Berkeley Language Center with 29 interns and 5 staff researching and analyzing lexical data on hundreds of lesser-known languages. Like a panlingual digital dictionary, PanLex aims to enable the translation of words from any language into all languages to support machine…

Principles and Practices of Translation and Interpretation in the Multilingual European Union The European Union is unique in the sense that it works and passes legislation in 24 official EU languages. Every EU citizen has the right to communicate with the EU institutions in any of these official languages, and all EU legislation is published…

The Place of Translation in Higher Education by Mairi McLaughlin, Department of French, University of California, Berkeley The Observer’s Robert McCrum declared 2011 a “boom year” for translation. It saw the anniversary of the King James’ Bible, the flourishing of literature in translation (Stieg Larsson, Haruki Murakami) and a new English version of the Roman…

Friday, October 7, 3:00 PM – 5:00 PM, B-4 Dwinelle Hall Opening remarks by Claire Kramsch, UC Berkeley Elizabeth Boner, San Francisco State University Negotiating relationship through translation: How American development practitioners and Tanzanian beneficiaries exploit the gap between languages This paper examines the practice of translation within meetings between American development practitioners and Tanzanian…

Pesky Pronouns and Pusillanimous Publishers: Some Reflections on the Practice and Business of Literary Translation David Dollenmayer, Professor of German, Worcester Polytechnic Institute Using the example of a work in progress – a translation of a novella by the contemporary Austrian writer Michael Köhlmeier – I will reflect on literary translation: what brought me to…

In August I was invited to attend a translation workshop in Seneffe, Belgium. The workshop brought together several translators of the Belgium author Jean-Philippe Toussaint to work on his latest novel, La Vérité sur Marie. I was one of a six translators attending this particular workshop, although the center itself (Centre Européen de Traduction Littéraire)…

Panel Discussion: The Role of Translation in Language Study Naturalization of Estrangement: Options in Translation Anna Livia Brawn, (French) French Department Faced with culturally specific terms, and terms which have highly emotional or symbolic meaning, translators have at their disposal a range of options; we can transfer the term to a context which is more…

This paper analyzes the strategies and challenges involved in the translation of English idioms in a specific domain of broadcast media. Current technology and distribution networks make it possible to watch series from around the world shortly after they are aired in their original language. Although sometimes dubbed, Internet-based TV series are often broadcast with multilingual subtitles. I will focus here specifically on idioms in subtitles translated from English into German, Norwegian, Spanish, and Portuguese. The study considers 10 comedy and drama series screened by media service providers (Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, and Filmin). The data will be described from a cognitive and contrastive perspective. I follow a methodology drawn from a previous article (Labarta Postigo, 2020). My main aim is to shed light on the strategies used in the translation process and to compare translation outcomes across languages. In terms of contrastive analysis, variants of the same language, such as Latin-American and European Spanish, and Brazilian and European Portuguese, have been considered. The findings of this study are of potential use in pedagogical applications that develop learners’ cultural awareness and their understanding of figurative language in the foreign languages in question, as well as in the field of audiovisual subtitling translation.

Dialogue might be the most appropriate medium for reflections on translingualism. In a dialogue conducted by email over the course of ten days, Steven G. Kellman and Ilan Stavans consider the validity and implications of linguistic determinism. Their conversation examines ...

The purpose of this study was to assess whether the well-documented paucity of object clitics in L2 French production reflects difficulties learners have comprehending these forms in classroom input. To this end, an aural French-English translation task was used to determine the extent ...