PANEL 4
CORPUS APPROACHES TO TRANSLATION STUDIES
Chair: Souhaila Messaoudi, University of Leeds
Using Corpora to Examine Translation and Language Change in the Field of Migration
Edward Clay (University of Birmingham, UK)
Migration is a key global issue in today’s social and political discourse, and the language used to discuss migration has a crucial influence on the way the issue is perceived by the public. This study therefore sets out to examine the language used to discuss and translate concepts in migration in English, French and Italian, and aims to understand if, how and why it has changed over time. Previous research suggests that translation itself can be a propagating factor in language change (Malamatidou, 2016; McLaughlin 2013; House, 2011), and this study examines whether this is also the case for migration. This approach uses corpus-research methods to examine possible lexical, syntactic and semantic changes which have occurred across these languages over time and will specifically focus on diachronic analysis of translations of EU legal texts and comparable corpora of newspaper texts on the same topic. Using corpus-research methods enables a quantitative and qualitative analysis of large amounts of data to provide an insight into the specific changes which the languages in question have undergone and to what extent translation may have played a role in propagating such changes (Zanettin, 2012). This approach constitutes the first multilingual study of translation-induced language change in the field of migration and will offer a fresh perspective on the evolution of the language used to discuss the issue. The diachronic element of the research and the focus on migration makes this a study which is both ‘across time’ and ‘across the globe’, and adopts an interdisciplinary approach encompassing translation studies, corpus-research methods, linguistics and law.
“Domesticating” Saudi Arabia: a CDA Investigation of Linguistic “violence” against Arabic via “Transediting”
Asma Alqunayir (Durham University, UK)
Translation involves power negotiation between the source and target languages, and by extension cultures. This negotiation can lead to power abuse, an “ethnocentric violence”, when “domesticating” the source text (ST) rather than “foreignization” it (Venuti, 1995). Translators in newsrooms routinely apply what Bielsa and Bassnett (2009:10) refer to as “absolute domestication”, though which the ST is “transedited”, that is to say edited and translated simultaneously (Stetting, 1989: 371-382). Applying a developed model of Discourse-Historical approach to CDA (Wodak and Meyer, 2016) in which a ST-TT comparative analysis dimension is added, this paper investigated the potential power abuse by the BBC Monitoring Middle East Service (hereinafter BBCM-M) through “transediting” via “domestication” via analyzing eight “transedited” texts (TETs) into English that have been published by the BBCM-M as part of their coverage on Saudi Arabia from Arabic news output. The examination exposed the BBCM-M’s exercise of an “ethnocentric” violence against Arabic via “transediting” into English using “domestication” both prior to and during “transediting” process via unveiling the forms of “rewriting” or topologies of “changes” (Lefevere, (1992) applied by the BBCM-M’s “transeditors”. This research demonstrates how translation in a cross-cultural situation such as news translation can be an apparatus for English “cultural hegemony” and “ethnocentric violence” against the source language.
Interpreters’ Mediation in Chinese-English Government Press Conferences: The Case of Explicitated Modal Adjuncts
Rongbo Fu (Beijing Foreign Studies University / Ningbo University, China)
In this study, we present an investigation into explicitated modal adjuncts in Chinese-English interpreted government press conferences - an important medium through which China publicizes its policies and positions on various issues and affairs internationally - with an eye to their implications for possible mediation by interpreters. To start with, a corpus of 18 press conferences (equally distributed in terms of interpreting mode, viz. consecutive and simultaneous, and topic) was built and subject to parallel alignment in order to facilitate the search of instances where such explicitation appear. All occurrences of explicitated modal adjuncts were then categorized into a tripartition in light of their intentional orientations, namely, the speaker, the listeners and the interpreting process, which were further distinguished in terms of the various functions they fulfilled in texts. Statistical results showed that while interpreters in both working mode engaged themselves in mediating and negotiating interpersonal relations in the publicity of government voices, consecutive interpreters were more poised to use explicitation of modal adjuncts as means of manifesting logical links, streamlining upcoming message, increasing intensity of certainty and mitigating assertion than their simultaneous counterparts. The reasons for such trend were briefly discussed.
Effectiveness of Video Games Localisation: The Case of Saudi Arabia
Abdullah Goaid Al-Otaibi (University of Leeds, UK)
With the emergence of video games localisation studies in the last decade, there has been an increase in the interest of researchers in translation studies in this young discipline. As a multimodal and multi-medial field, it covers a wide range of technological, linguistic and semiotic elements (Bernal-Merino, 2014). Although globalisation influences video games companies to offer their products in as many languages and markets as financially profitable, this discipline is still an under-researched area, especially in the context of the Arab World. This research focuses on the Saudi Arabian market, which is one of the largest twenty markets of video games in the World. This market has a distinctive situation due to its cultural, political, and linguistic issues.
This study deals with the specificities of video games localisation in the Saudi Arabian market, covering religious, political and cultural perspectives. Some games were not published because of not adhering to this market’s values, and although certain video games companies tried to localise their products to satisfy the needs of this market, some of their games also fell short of publishing criteria. In this research, I will investigate a number of case studies to highlight the main factors that govern the dynamics of localisation for the video games market in Saudi Arabia. These factors include the regulations of the state, the challenges that rise when localising these products into Arabic and the delicate area of preferences and expectations of the intended audience when it comes to consuming these digital entertainment products.