Does translation hinder integration?

2006 and 2007 saw renewed debates about rising costs of public sector translation and interpreting. One argument put forward was that the provision of such services for the immigrant population is deterring community cohesion in the UK. For example, the former education secretary Ruth Kelly raised the question of whether we are providing a ‘crutch’ by making translations available to immigrants, thus not giving them the incentive to learn English. The paper will address this question in the context of language policies and language ideologies in the UK. It will be argued that the debate about translation services has been instrumentalised for the discursive construction of identities.

"The Alien Within":translation into German during the Nazi regime

In a regime obsessed with purity, what place could there be for a literary practice that epitomises hybridity — translation? Examining the discourse on translation in Nazi literary journals, this study shows how foreign literature was viewed through the prism of national identity formation, in terms of the threats or benefits to nationhood which translation might offer. The fortunes of translation under the strictures of censorship are traced with an analysis of official policies and publication patterns, complemented by two detailed case studies of translations from English.

Translation research versus interpreting research: kinship, differences and prospects for partnership

Despite differences, translation and interpreting have much in common. This volume focuses on aspects of conducting research into these two modes. It reviews recent developments and explores kinship, differences and prospects for partnership between Translation Research and Interpreting Research.

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?

Representing others:translation, ethnography and museum

Cultural anthropology has always been dependent on translation as a textual practice, and it has often used 'translation' as a metaphor to describe ethnography's processes of interpretation and cross-cultural comparison. Questions of intelligibility and representation are central to both translation studies and ethnographic writing - as are the dilemmas of cultural distance or proximity, exoticism or appropriation. Similarly, recent work in museum studies discusses problems of representation that are raised by ethnographic museums as multimedia 'translations'. However, as yet there has been remarkably little interdisciplinary exchange: neither has translation studies kept up with the sophistication of anthropology's investigations of meaning, representation and 'culture' itself, nor have anthropology and museum studies often looked to translation studies for analyses of language difference or concrete methods of tracing translation practices.

The Internet and other IT resources:tools for translators within a translation programme

Information technology has increased both the speed and medium of communication between nations. It has brought the world closer, but it has also created new challenges for translation — how we think about it, how we carry it out and how we teach it. Translation and Information Technology has brought together experts in computational linguistics, machine translation, translation education, and translation studies to discuss how these new technologies work, the effect of electronic tools, such as the internet, bilingual corpora, and computer software, on translator education and the practice of translation, as well as the conceptual gaps raised by the interface of human and machine.

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.

Is there a special kind of "reading" for translation? An empirical investigation of reading in the translation process

The role of reading in translation is rarely discussed in the literature. Translation has mainly been discussed within a product-oriented framework. The more process-oriented approaches of recent years have taken notice of reading as a component activity of the translation process. However, few empirical studies have been completed which address the role of reading in translation. The way a person reads, and the result of that reading (some sort of mental representation of the text or text segment), will depend on the reader's purposes and motivations. The present empirical study indicates that while the translator's reading of a text may be to some extent more thorough and deliberate than that of an ordinary reader, it is not likely to be markedly so. The study also indicates a significant variability in the way translators "read for translation". This suggests the existence of alternate strategies in this kind of reading.