Trans-language, trans-culture, trans-translation?

The growth of the discipline of translation studies has been accompanied by are newed reflection on the object of research and our metalanguage. These developments have also been necessitated by the diversification of professions within the language industry. The very label translation is often avoided in favour of alternative terms, such as localisation (of software), trans creation (of advertising), trans editing (of information from press agencies). The competences framework developed for the European Master’s in Translation network speaks of experts in multilingual and multimedia communication to account for the complexity of translation competence. This paper addresses the following related questions: (i) How can translation competence in such awide sense be developed in training programmes? (ii) Do some competences required in the industry go beyond translation competence? and (iii) What challenges do labels such as trans creation pose?

Standardisation and benchmarking for improving translator training

The worldwide growth of the translation industry requires qualified professional translators. During the last decade, we have seen an enormous increase in translator training programmes offered by universities, mainly at postgraduate level. A challenge for such university programmes is to make sure that they prepare graduates who are qualified for the needs of the diverse profession in the rapidly changing market. This means that programmes need to be developed with the market needs in mind and that they need to ensure a good match between graduates' competences and employers' requirements. This paper addresses the following questions: How can universities adapt translator training programmes to the rapidly changing industry and the accompanying changes in professional profiles? How can we reconcile the requests of the industry for graduates who have practical and professional skills with the requests of the universities for graduates who have in-depth academic knowledge and intellectual skills? What standards and benchmarks are in place to assure quality of translator training programmes? Some such developments in respect of benchmarking are illustrated at first for the United Kingdom, followed by information on the European Master’s in Translation (EMT) project, an initiative at the European level. Finally, the paper reflects on the challenges which the EMT translator competence profile poses for university programmes.

Study on fatigue and energy-dissipation properties of nanolayered Cu/Nb thin films

Energy dissipation and fatigue properties of nano-layered thin films are less well studied than bulk properties. Existing experimental methods for studying energy dissipation properties, typically using magnetic interaction as a driving force at different frequencies and a laser-based deformation measurement system, are difficult to apply to two-dimensional materials. We propose a novel experimental method to perform dynamic testing on thin-film materials by driving a cantilever specimen at its fixed end with a bimorph piezoelectric actuator and monitoring the displacements of the specimen and the actuator with a fibre-optic system. Upon vibration, the specimen is greatly affected by its inertia, and behaves as a cantilever beam under base excitation in translation. At resonance, this method resembles the vibrating reed method conventionally used in the viscoelasticity community. The loss tangent is obtained from both the width of a resonance peak and a free-decay process. As for fatigue measurement, we implement a control algorithm into LabView to maintain maximum displacement of the specimen during the course of the experiment. The fatigue S-N curves are obtained.

Labeled EF-Tus for rapid kinetic studies of pretranslocation complex formation

The universally conserved translation elongation factor EF-Tu delivers aminoacyl(aa)-tRNA in the form of an aa-tRNA·EF-Tu·GTP ternary complex (TC) to the ribosome where it binds to the cognate mRNA codon within the ribosomal A-site, leading to formation of a pretranslocation (PRE) complex. Here we describe preparation of QSY9 and Cy5 derivatives of the variant E348C-EF-Tu that are functional in translation elongation. Together with fluorophore derivatives of aa-tRNA and of ribosomal protein L11, located within the GTPase associated center (GAC), these labeled EF-Tus allow development of two new FRET assays that permit the dynamics of distance changes between EF-Tu and both L11 (Tu-L11 assay) and aa-tRNA (Tu-tRNA assay) to be determined during the decoding process. We use these assays to examine: (i) the relative rates of EF-Tu movement away from the GAC and from aa-tRNA during decoding, (ii) the effects of the misreading-inducing antibiotics streptomycin and paromomycin on tRNA selection at the A-site, and (iii) how strengthening the binding of aa-tRNA to EF-Tu affects the rate of EF-Tu movement away from L11 on the ribosome. These FRET assays have the potential to be adapted for high throughput screening of ribosomal antibiotics.

A quality driven adaptation scheme for DASH streaming

In this work we present a quality driven approach to DASH (Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP) for segment selection in varying network conditions. Current adaption algorithms focus largely on regulating data rates using network layer parameters by selecting the level of quality on offer that can eliminate buffer underrun without considering picture fidelity. In reality, viewers may accept a level of buffer underrun in order to achieve an improved level of picture fidelity. In this case, the conventional DASH algorithms can cause extreme degradation of the picture fidelity when attempting to eliminate buffer underrun with scarce bandwidth availability. Our work is concerned with a quality-aware rate adaption scheme that maximizes the client's quality of experience in terms of both continuity and fidelity (picture quality). Results show that the scheme proposed can maintain a high level of quality for streaming services, especially at low packet loss rates. It is also shown that by eliminating buffer underrun completely, the PSNR that reflects the picture quality of the video is greatly reduced. Our scheme offers the offset between continuity-based quality and resolution-based quality, which can be used to set threshold values for the level of quality desired by clients with different quality requirements. © 2013 IEEE.

Client QoE-oriented segment selection for DASH

A segment selection method controlled by Quality of Experience (QoE) factors for Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (DASH) is presented in this paper. Current rate adaption algorithms aim to eliminate buffer underrun events by significantly reducing the code rate when experiencing pauses in replay. In reality, however, viewers may choose to accept a level of buffer underrun in order to achieve an improved level of picture fidelity or to accept the degradation in picture fidelity in order to maintain the service continuity. The proposed rate adaption scheme in our work can maximize the user QoE in terms of both continuity and fidelity (picture quality) in DASH applications. It is shown that using this scheme a high level of quality for streaming services, especially at low packet loss rates, can be achieved. Our scheme can also maintain a best trade-off between continuity-based quality and fidelity-based quality, by determining proper threshold values for the level of quality intended by clients with different quality requirements. In addition, the integration of the rate adaptation mechanism with the scheduling process is investigated in the context of a mobile communication network and related performances are analyzed.

The other on display: translation in the Ethnographic Museum

The ethnographic museum in the West has a long and troubling history. The display of 'exotic peoples' in travelling exhibitions began as early as the sixteenth century, but it was the mid and late nineteenth century that saw the great expansion of museums as sites to show artefacts collected - under anything but reputable circumstances - from what were considered the 'primitive', 'natural', or 'tribal' peoples of the world. Today the ethnographic museum is still a feature of large European cities, though faced with newly formulated dilemmas in the postcolonial world. For how can the material culture of a non-western people be collected and displayed in the West without its makers being translated into wordless and powerless objects of visual consumption? In national museums the processes of choosing, contextualizing and commentating exhibits help form national identity; in the ethnographic museum, similarly, they shape perceptions of the apparently distant Other. Like written ethnography, the museum is a 'translation of culture', with many of the associated problems traced by Talal Asad (1986). Like the written form, it has to represent the dialogic realities of cultural encounters in a fixed and intelligible form, to propose categories that define and order the material it has gathered. As the public face of academic ethnography, the museum interprets other cultures for the benefit of the general reader, and in that task museum practice, like all ethnography, operates within very specific historical and political parameters. How are museums in western Europe responding to the issues raised by critical ethnographers like James Clifford (1988), with their focus on the politics of representation? Is globalisation increasing the degree of accountability imposed on the ethnographic museum, or merely reinforcing older patterns? What opportunities and problems are raised by the use of more words - more 'translation' in the narrower sense - in ethnographic museums, and how do museums gain from introducing a reflexive and contextualizing concept of "thick translation" (Appiah 1993) into their work of interpretation?

World knowledge in the process of translation

The paper illustrates the role of world knowledge in comprehending and translating texts. A short news item, which displays world knowledge fairly implicitly in condensed lexical forms, was translated by students from English into German. It is shown that their translation strategies changed from a first draft which was rather close to the surface structure of the source text to a final version which took situational aspects, texttypological conventions and the different background knowledge of the respective addressees into account. Decisions on how much world knowledge has to be made explicit in the target text, however, must be based on the relevance principle. Consequences for teaching and for the notions of semantic knowledge and world knowledge are discussed.

Translation in the global village

Recent developments, particularly globalization and advances in technology, have affected our production and perception of language, as reflected in two conflicting forces, globalism and tribalism. The role of English as an international lingua franca is dicussed, and conclusions are drawn for the varying activities of translation today and for the rapidly changing job profile of the translator.