A linguistic and semantic approach to the theory and practice of literary translation

This work explores the relevance of semantic and linguistic description to translation, theory and practice. It is aimed towards a practical model of approach to texts to translate. As literary texts [poetry mainly] are the focus of attention, so are stylistic matters. Note, however, that 'style', and, to some extent, the conclusions of the work, are not limited to so-called literary texts. The study of semantic description reveals that most translation problems do not stem from the cognitive (langue-related), but rather from the contextual (parole-related) aspects of meaning. Thus, any linguistic model that fails to account for the latter is bound to fall short. T.G.G. does, whereas Systemics, concerned with both the 'Iangue' and 'parole' (stylistic and sociolinguistic mainly) aspects of meaning, provides a useful framework of approach to texts to translate. Two essential semantic principles for translation are: that meaning is the property of a language (Firth); and the 'relativity of meaning assignments' (Tymoczko). Both imply that meaning can only be assessed, correctly, in the relevant socio-cultural background. Translation is seen as a restricted creation, and the translator's encroach as a three-dimensional critical one. To encompass the most technical to the most literary text, and account for variations in emphasis in any text, translation theory must be based on typology of function Halliday's ideational, interpersonal and textual, or, Buhler's symbol, signal, symptom, Functions3. Function Coverall and specific] will dictate aims and method, and also provide the critic with criteria to assess translation Faithfulness. Translation can never be reduced to purely objective methods, however. Intuitive procedures intervene, in textual interpretation and analysis, in the choice of equivalents, and in the reception of a translation. Ultimately, translation, theory and practice, may perhaps constitute the touchstone as regards the validity of linguistic and semantic theories.

A Franco-British comparison of patterns of working hours in large-scale grocery retailing, with specific reference to part-time work

In this thesis patterns of working hours in large-scale grocery retailing in Britain and France are compared. The research is carried out using cross-national comparative methodology, and the analysis is based on information derived from secondary sources and empirical research in large-scale grocery retailing involving employers and trade unions at industry level and case studies at outlet level. The thesis begins by comparing national patterns of working hours in Britain and France over the post-war period. Subsequently, a detailed comparison of working hours in large-scale grocery retailing in Britain and France is carried out through the analysis of secondary sources and empirical data. Emphasis is placed on analyzing part-time working hours. They are contrasted and compared at national level and explained in terms of supply and demand factors. The relationships between the structuring of, and satisfaction with, working hours and factors determining women's integration in the workforce in Britain and France are investigated. Part-time hours are then compared and contrasted in large-scale grocery retailing in the context of the analysis of working hours. The relationship between the structuring of working hours and satisfaction with them is examined in both countries through research with women part-timers in case study outlets. The cross-national comparative methodology is used to examine whether dissimilar national contexts in Britain and France have led to different patterns of working hours in large-scale grocery retailing. The principal conclusion is that significant differences are found in the length, organization and flexibility of working hours and that these differences can be attributed to dissimilar socio-economic, political, and cultural contexts in the two countries.

A study in Britain and France of the development of cross-cultural in-house sales training using distance learning.

The thesis is concerned with cross-cultural distance learning in two countries: Great Britain and France. Taking the example of in-house sales training, it argues that it is possible to develop courses for use in two or more countries of differing culture and language. Two courses were developed by the researcher. Both were essentially print-based distance-learning courses designed to help salespeople achieve a better understanding of their customers. One used a quantitative, the other qualitative approach. One considered the concept of the return on investment and the other, for which a video support was also developed, considered the analysis of a customer's needs. Part 1 of the thesis considers differences in the training context between France and Britain followed by a review of the learning process with reference to distance learning. Part 2 looks at the choice of training medium course design and evaluation and sets out the methodology adopted, including problems encountered in this type of fieldwork. Part 3 analyses the data and draws conclusions from the findings, before offering a series of guidelines for those concerned with the development of cross-cultural in-house training courses. The results of the field tests on the two courses were analysed in relation to the socio-cultural, educational and experiential background of the learners as well as their preferred learning styles. The thesis argues that it is possible to develop effective in-house sales training courses to be used in two cultures and identifies key considerations which need to be taken into account when carrying out this type of work.

Manufacturing organisation in developing countries with particular reference to Iraq

Industrially developed countries are able to absorb modern techniques of science and technology quite readily; this is not the case for less-developed countries. Attempts made by developing countries have been ineffective due to factors not readily admitted. This thesis highlights the areas that need to be developed by under-developed countries, and covers economic, scientific and technological, and social aspects as well as technology transfer. Economic areas considered acknowledge that within any one country there should be proper procedures for planning economic and industrial projects (plant design) supported by efficient economic development strategy. Scientific and technological factors considered include the major areas that need to be developed in order to produce and/or deal with scientific and technological issues for the interest of the national development. Technology transfer areas considered include the necessity of building up a national body (system) responsible for dealing with activities and tasks of transferring foreign-made technology so that it can be employed effectively within the environment of the country. Social factors considered include the need to develop human resources which can be employed efficiently into the whole process of development, and particularly for the above proposed systems. Education and training are the major elements that ought to be tackled to produce skilled manpower and to overcome the social and cultural values and traditions that are inherited by the society. This thesis highlights the above areas in an attempt to plan and organise the development of science and technology, and their implementation into the development as a whole. Whilst recognising the problems of creating this sort of development in developing countries, the author considers the benefits to be obtained are much greater in the long run.

Adolescents and the experience of parental divorce:including reference to the expectations of teacher trainees

The aims of this study were to investigate the impact of parental divorce on adolescents, and the expectations of teacher trainees with regard to children of divorce. The literature related to children of divorce is reviewed and the results of interviews with a sample of recently divorced custodial parents and their adolescent children, using a structured interview schedule, are described. The semantic differential technique was used to obtain ratings of a sample of teacher trainees' expectations of children of divorce as compared with their ratings of several other categories of children. The results of the interviews with parents and their adolescent children suggested that parental divorce does not necessarily interfere with adolescent development and that for some adolescents the reduction of conflict in the home might enhance normal development. They also suggest that adolescents would prefer to live in a one parent home rather than a two parent home which is fraught with conflict, and that it is preferable for parents who are unable to resolve such conflict in any other way to separate rather than allow it to persist. The ratings of children of divorce by teacher trainees suggest that they hold more negative expectations of such children than of other groups • such as adopted children. The contrast between this finding and the results of the interviews with adolescents and their parents lends some support to the existence of the divorce myth; that is, the cultural belief that divorce has the inherent power to make people unhappy. The implications for policy, practice and further research are discussed.

Developing translation competence

This volume presents a comprehensive study of what constitutes Translation Competence, from the various sub-competences to the overall skill. Contributors combine experience as translation scholars with their experience as teachers of translation. The volume is organized into three sections: Defining, Building, and Assessing Translation Competence. The chapters offer insights into the nature of translation competence and its place in the translation training programme in an academic environment and show how theoretical considerations have contributed to defining, building and assessing translation competence, offering practical examples of how this can be achieved. The first section introduces major sub-competences, including linguistic, cultural, textual, subject, research, and transfer competence. The second section presents issues relating to course design, methodology and teaching practice. The third section reflects on criteria for quality assessment.

A comparative analysis of cultural value orientations of Polish and Turkish employees:implications for international human resource management

This study empirically compares and contrasts the cultural value orientations of employees from Poland and Turkey by testing the compatibility of their values in three stages through seven cultural dimensions. The first phase of the study deals with the assessment of inter-country cultural value differences; the second phase investigates the intra-country cultural dynamics between selected demographic groups; and the third phase examines the inter-country cultural differences among the selected demographic groups of employees. The research has been conducted adopting the Maznevski, DiStephano, and Nason's (1995) version of cultural perspectives questionnaire with a sample of 744 (548 Polish and 196 Turkish) respondents. The results show significant cultural differences between Poland and Turkey, a presence of cultural dynamics among certain demographic groups within the country, and a mixture of convergence and divergence in the value systems of certain demographic groups both within and between the two nation(s). The research findings convey important messages to international human resource strategists in order for them to employ an effective and rational employment policy and business negotiation approach(es) to effectively operate in these countries. It also highlights that diversity of cultural values not only requires viewing each of them through cultural dimensions at a macro-level with a cross-country reference, but also requires monitoring their dynamics at the micro-level with reference to controlled demographic groups. © 2013 Taylor & Francis.

Investigating the process of translation:humour translation norms, strategies and approaches in children's literature

Research in the present thesis is focused on the norms, strategies,and approaches which translators employ when translating humour in Children's Literature from English into Greek. It is based on process-oriented descriptive translation studies, since the focus is on investigating the process of translation. Viewing translation as a cognitive process and a problem soling activity, this thesis Think-aloud protocols (TAPs) in order to investigate translator's minds. As it is not possible to directly observe the human mind at work, an attempt is made to ask the translators themselves to reveal their mental processes in real time by verbalising their thoughts while carrying out a translation task involving humour. In this study, thirty participants at three different levels of expertise in translation competence, i.e. tn beginner, ten competent, and ten experts translators, were requested to translate two humourous extracts from the fictional diary novel The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13 ¾ by Sue Townsend (1982) from English into Greek. As they translated, they were asked to verbalise their thoughts and reason them, whenever possible, so that their strategies and approaches could be detected, and that subsequently, the norms that govern these strategies and approaches could be revealed. The thesis consists of four parts: the introduction, the literature review, the study, and the conclusion, and is developed in eleven chapters. the introduction contextualises the study within translation studies (TS) and presents its rationale, research questions, aims, and significance. Chapters 1 to 7 present an extensive and inclusive literature review identifying the principles axioms that guide and inform the study. In these seven chapters the following areas are critically introduced: Children's literature (Chapter 1), Children's Literature Translation (Chapter 2), Norms in Children's Literature (Chapter 3), Strategies in Children's Literature (Chapter 4), Humour in Children's Literature Translation (Chapter 5), Development of Translation Competence (Chapter 6), and Translation Process Research (Chapter 7). In Chapters 8 - 11 the fieldwork is described in detail. the piolot and the man study are described with a reference to he environments and setting, the participants, the research -observer, the data and its analysis, and limitations of the study. The findings of the study are presented and analysed in Chapter 9. Three models are then suggested for systematising translators' norms, strategies, and approaches, thus, filling the existing gap in the field. Pedagogical norms (e.g. appropriateness/correctness, famililarity, simplicity, comprehensibility, and toning down), literary norms (e.g. sound of language and fluency). and source-text norms (e.g. equivalence) were revealed to b the most prominent general and specific norms governing the translators'  strategies and approaches in the process of translating humour in ChL. The data also revealed that monitoring and communication strategies (e.g. additions, omissions, and exoticism) were the prevalent strategies employed by translators. In Chapter 10 the main findings and outcomes of a potential secondary benefit (beneficial outcomes) are discussed on the basis of the research questions and aims of the study, and implications of the study are tackled in Chapter 11. In the conclusion, suggestions for future directions are given and final remarks noted.

The idea of the hybrid text in translation revisited

This concluding chapter provides responses to some of the issues raised in the individual chapters, highlighting similarities and differences in the interpretation of the concept of the hybrid text. The questions dealt with here concern the notion of hybridity and the definition of hybrid text; the contexts in which hybrid texts emerge; the functions of hybrid texts; the various levels at which hybrid phenomena manifest themselves; the genres to which the notion of the hybrid text applies; the effects of hybrid texts; and the status of a hybrid text in Translation Studies. It is concluded that the phenomenon of the hybrid text involves greater complexity than had initially been defined in the discussion paper. There-fore, the original hypothesis is reformulated to account for the fact that hybrid texts are not only the product of a translation process but that they can also be produced as original texts in a specific cultural space, which is often in itself an intersection of different cultures.

Special issue:key debates in the translation of advertising material

Much has been written about the marketing aspects of promotional material in general, and several scholars (particularly in linguistics) have addressed questions relating to the structure and function of advertisements, focusing on images, rhetorical structure, semiotic functions, discourse features and audio-visual media, amongst other aspects of the genre. Not much, on the other hand, has been written within translation studies about the complexities involved in the transfer of an advertising message. Contributors to this volume explore various interdependent aspects of the interlingual and intercultural transfer of an advertising message. They emphasize features of culture specificity, of multi-medial semiotic interaction, of values and stereotypes, and most importantly, they recommend strategies and approaches to assist translators. Topics covered include a critique of the Western-based approach to advertising in the context of the Far East; different perceptions of the concept of cleanliness in advertising texts in Italy, Russia and the UK; the Walls Cornetto strategy of internationalization of product appeal, followed by localization; the role of the translator in recreating appeal in different lingua-cultural contexts; what constitutes 'Italianness' in advertisements for British consumers; and strategies for repackaging France as a tourist destination.

Translation and peace:Arabic, English and Hebrew versions of Israeli-Palestinian peace initiatives

The present thesis examines Palestinian-Israeli peace initiatives as politically negotiated texts and their different Arabic, English and Hebrew language versions. Its aim is to make a contribution to a deeper understanding of the role of translation and recontextualization of politically negotiated texts in situations of ongoing contemporary conflict. In modern Translation Studies, although research exists on the translation of political texts following functional (e.g. Schäffner 2002) or systemic-linguistic (e.g. Calzada-Pérez 2001) approaches or applying narrative theory (Baker 2006), peace initiatives and politically negotiated texts are still a largely under-researched genre of political texts. The thesis – which takes 31 Arabic, English and Hebrew language versions of 5 different Palestinian-Israeli peace initiatives as its corpus – operates within the framework of product-oriented Descriptive Translation Studies (Lambert and Van Gorp 1985) and Critical Discourse Analysis (Fairclough 1992). For all of the peace initiatives analysed, there exist several language versions which were made available in different contexts by different institutions and for different readerships and purposes. The thesis pursues a top-down approach. It begins with presenting the socio-cultural and political contexts of the production of the original versions of the respective peace initiatives (the source texts) and their different language versions (target texts), focusing on their underlying functions and principles of audience design. It then moves to examine how the textual profiles of the language versions of peace initiatives reflect aspects of ideology, political affiliation and power relations at both the macro- and micro-structural levels. The final step is to account for these aspects in terms of socio-political and institutional conditions of the production of the translations. The overall textual analysis demonstrates that when translated, peace initiatives can be interpreted differently by different institutions in their attempt to promote their respective political interests and narratives. Also, it is very frequently that translations produced in one specific institutional context are recontextualised for use in another one. Such recontextualisation goes hand in hand with further textual amendments. To summarize, the thesis demonstrates how these translations – as products – are (re)framed and (re)contextualized in different institutional settings in order to serve different purposes. These texts, thus, play different roles in situations of ongoing contemporary conflict depending on the institutional context in which they are presented and the purposes they set to serve. These main findings make an original contribution to the discipline of Translation Studies in respect of emphasizing the need to study translations in their socio-political, historical and institutional contexts.

Corpus linguistics

Corpora—large collections of written and/or spoken text stored and accessed electronically—provide the means of investigating language that is of growing importance academically and professionally. Corpora are now routinely used in the following fields: The production of dictionaries and other reference materials; The development of aids to translation; Language teaching materials; The investigation of ideologies and cultural assumptions; Natural language processing; and The investigation of all aspects of linguistic behaviour, including vocabulary, grammar and pragmatics.

The role of social agents in the translation into English of the novels of Naguib Mahfouz

This research investigates the field of translation in an Egyptain context around the work of the Egyptian writer and Nobel Laureate Naguib Mahfouz by adopting Pierre Bourdieu’s sociological framework. Bourdieu’s framework is used to examine the relationship between the field of cultural production and its social agents. The thesis includes investigation in two areas: first, the role of social agents in structuring and restructuring the field of translation, taking Mahfouz’s works as a case study; their role in the production and reception of translations and their practices in the field; and second, the way the field, with its political and socio-cultural factors, has influenced translators’ behaviour and structured their practices. In this research, it is argued that there are important social agents who have contributed significantly to the structure of the field and its boundaries. These are key social agents in the field namely; the main English language publisher in Egypt, the American University in Cairo Press (AUCP); the translators: Denys Johnson-Davies, Roger Allen and Trevor Le Gassick; and the author, Naguib Mahfouz. Their roles and contributions are examined and discussed through the lens of Bourdieu’s sociology. Particular focus is given to the author Mahfouz and his award of the Nobel Prize, and how this award has influenced the field of cultural production and its social agents. Also, it is argued that socio-cultural factors in the field, in the period between 1960s and 2000s, affected the translators’ practices in terms of modes of production of Mahfouz’s works. To investigate the influence of these factors on translators’ practices in the field, empirical examination is conducted, at the textual level, on a corpus of six translated novels written by the same author, Mahfouz. It is shown that the translators have an increased tendency, over time, towards applying a foreignising approach in their translations of culture-specific items. The translators’ behaviour, which is a result of their habitus, is correlated to political and socio-cultural factors in the field of translation. That is, based on interviews conducted with the translators, it has been found that there are particular factors influenced their translational habitus and, thus, their practices during the production process of the translations.

The Latest Prague Contributions to Written Cultural Heritage Processing

* The following text has been originally published in the Proceedings of the Language Recourses and Evaluation Conference held in Lisbon, Portugal, 2004, under the title of "Towards Intelligent Written Cultural Heritage Processing - Lexical processing". I present here a revised contribution of the aforementioned paper and I add here the latest efforts done in the Center for Computational Linguistic in Prague in the field under discussion.

Automatic Translation of MSC Diagrams into Petri Nets

Development-engineers use in their work languages intended for software or hardware systems design, and test engineers utilize languages effective in verification, analysis of the systems properties and testing. Automatic interfaces between languages of these kinds are necessary in order to avoid ambiguous understanding of specification of models of the systems and inconsistencies in the initial requirements for the systems development. Algorithm of automatic translation of MSC (Message Sequence Chart) diagrams compliant with MSC’2000 standard into Petri Nets is suggested in this paper. Each input MSC diagram is translated into Petri Net (PN), obtained PNs are sequentially composed in order to synthesize a whole system in one final combined PN. The principle of such composition is defined through the basic element of MSC language — conditions. While translating reference table is developed for maintenance of consistent coordination between the input system’s descriptions in MSC language and in PN format. This table is necessary to present the results of analysis and verification on PN in suitable for the development-engineer format of MSC diagrams. The proof of algorithm correctness is based on the use of process algebra ACP. The most significant feature of the given algorithm is the way of handling of conditions. The direction for future work is the development of integral, partially or completely automated technological process, which will allow designing system, testing and verifying its various properties in the one frame.