English as a lingua franca (ELF) in Chinese fansubbers’ practices

Babel ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 66 (3) ◽  
pp. 365-380
Author(s):  
Tzu-yi Elaine Lee

Abstract As a global phenomenon, English as a lingua franca (ELF) has been rigorously researched in many fields but completely ignored in translation studies. Based on a previous study, this study accordingly sets out to investigate the ELF phenomenon in the fansubbing culture with a specific focus on the notes and comments by fansubbers, arguing that fansubbing as a practice creates a space for dialogue between fan translators and their viewers that leads to the ‘empowerment’ of fansubbers as linguistic and cultural mediators. By examining specific screenshots of headnotes and comments by amateur translators with regard to six seasons of the TV series Rizzoli & Isles, this paper discusses background reasons for ELF applied by fansubbers, the implications of the ELF phenomenon in fansubbing culture, and the potential effects of fansubbing upon the audience in contradistinction to the effects of commercial subtitling and upon the translation profession as a whole. Finally, this article hopes to shed light on Chinese fansubbers who in fact blur the traditional distinction between professional and amateur subtitling, and concludes that the specific language practices fansubbers are engaged in show – as both fans and translators – an unlimited degree of latitude from mainstream subtitling.

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (7) ◽  
pp. 3613
Author(s):  
Carola Kleemann

The coastal areas of Finnmark have deep Sámi roots. With the Norwegian assimilation policy—Norwegianization—the transition to the Norwegian language has been extensive here, placing the region outside Sámi core areas. Nevertheless, indigenous Sea Sámi identity still exists, and language vitalization and raising awareness of culture are shown in Sámi institution building. Within these frames, kindergarten teachers with Sámi backgrounds work to strengthen their local Sámi language and culture in a Sámi department of a kindergarten outside the core Sámi areas. This article aims to shed light on how the use of their bilingual resources in pedagogical translanguaging practices can build sustainable language practices for North Sámi. With children and adults, we explored how culturally aware, situated outdoors activities, such as building a campfire and gathering berries, encouraged children’s use of North Sámi. Both children and adults recorded these activities with GoPro cameras. The material was transcribed and analyzed using Conversation Analysis and translanguaging. For this article, I chose three episodes in which kindergarten teachers used their bilingual language register to interact with children in different pedagogical practices to give children input in North Sámi. Pedagogical translanguaging with young language learners in an emergent bilingual situation could help strengthen North Sámi language and culture outside Sámi core areas.


Adaptation ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 210-223
Author(s):  
Eduard Cuelenaere

Abstract This article argues that, after decades of pointing towards the importance of including production and reception research into the study of film remakes, we should actually start addressing production and reception methodologies and investigate why this is necessary for the sustainability and future development of the field. I argue that a lot can be learned from the insights coming from the existing methodologies that are being used in, that is, format studies, (critical) media industry studies, (audiovisual) translation studies, and more recently the study of cultural transduction. The first section of the article mainly deals with the importance of investigating the different cultural mediators that take part in the production lifecycle of the film remake. It is contended that the analysis of film remakes should start examining the different individuals or institutions that mediate or intervene between the production of cultural artefacts and the generation of consumer preferences. The second part of the article points towards the importance of investigating the reception, experience, and interpretation of film remakes. It is shown that crucial questions like ‘(why) do audiences prefer the domestic remake over the foreign film?’, ‘how do audiences experience, interpret, and explain differences and similarities between source films and remakes?’, but also ‘how do audiences define and assess film remakes?’ remain yet to be asked. The article concludes that if the field of remake studies wishes to break out of its disciplinary boundaries, adopting a multi-methodological approach will help to further brush off its dusty character of textual analysis.


Pragmatics ◽  
2006 ◽  
Vol 16 (4) ◽  
pp. 429-456 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chie Fukuda

So-called traditional theories in second langauge acquisition (SLA) have been criticized for their neglect to examine interactional, social, and political aspects in language practices. The present study will illustrate exoticization, one of the political phenomena observed in interactions between native-speaker and non-native speaker (NS/NNS). Exoticization is known as a covert power exercise where ‘self’ creates inferior ‘other’ in order to establish and maintain its superiority (Said 1978), which involves identity construction and categorization. Adopting a conversation analysis (CA) approach and utilizing NS-NNS conversations in Japanese, this study will first demonstrate how exoticization is discursively constructed through the development of interactions. Then the study will explore how the NNS participant tries to resist such practices. By so doing, this study will shed light on interactional and ideological aspects of language practices and society as a learning environment. The study will also suggest the necessity for exploring what NNSs face in real L2 societies in order to develop emic perspectives in SLA studies.


Target ◽  
2007 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 313-325 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mary Snell-Hornby

Terminology has often proved to be a problem in scholarly discourse, and Translation Studies is a case in point. Even the name of the discipline has been an issue since James Holmes brought it up in 1972, and the central concept of the time, equivalence, despite incessant debate and revaluation in some schools of thought, has in others long since been discarded as an illusion. Basically there are three possibilities open to the scholar wanting to introduce a new technical term: – As in the case of norm (Toury), a word from general language can be used in a specified sense and defined as such. The danger arises that it can be misinterpreted and used differently in other languages (as with Vermeer’s Norm). – the invention of completely new terms, as with Justa Holz-Mänttäri’s Botschaftsträger. – A word is taken over from a classical dead language, such as Latin or Greek, and given a specific definition for the theory concerned, as was the case with skopos in the functionalist approach. Referring to experience in editing the Handbuch Translation, the essay discusses this issue in detail. It also deals with the use of English as a lingua franca in the metadiscourse of Translation Studies.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Szilvia Zörgő ◽  
Gjalt - Jorn Ygram Peters ◽  
Clare Porter ◽  
Marcia Moraes ◽  
Savannah Donegan ◽  
...  

Quantitative Ethnography is a nascent field now formulating the specifics of its conceptual framework and terminology for a unified, quantitative – qualitative methodology. Our living, systematic review aims to shed light on decisions in research design that the community has made thus far in the domain of data collection, coding & segmentation, analysis, and how Quantitative Ethnography as a methodology is conceptualized. Our analysis intends to spur discussions on these issues within the community and help establish a lingua franca.


2020 ◽  
Vol 13 ◽  
pp. 29-43
Author(s):  
Mona ARHIRE

Recurrent features of translation, sometimes labelled as ‘translation universals’, have been intensively investigated within Descriptive Corpus-based Translation Studies. Numerous language pairs have been set under researchers’ lens with a view to observing languages from a contrastive viewpoint, but also individually, in their translational manifestations. This has enabled the identification of characteristic features of the translational facets of languages, which have generated more and more nuanced scholarly theories. This paper examines the occurrence of some of the most frequent features of translation, namely: explicitation, simplification and neutralisation in the translation of reference as a cohesive device. Methodologically speaking, the investigation combines the theoretical and applied areas of Translation Studies, with an interdisciplinary dimension provided by the fusion of methodological input borrowed from Descriptive Translation Studies, Discourse Analysis and Contrastive Studies. The theoretical component of the research refers to issues of contrastiveness between English and Romanian viewed from a translational angle, in terms of equivalence and the occurrence of the three features of translation. The applied area of Translation Studies comprises the empirical approach to the translation of reference, while addressing not only the researchers’ community, but also the practitioners in translation and the translator training environment. The research applies both quantitative and qualitative methods to investigate the data selected from John Fowles’ novel Mantissa (1982) and its translation into Romanian by Angela Jianu (Fowles 1995). The findings provide insights into the nature and functions of referring expressions as formal links, but also as stylistic devices, and shed light into issues related to contrastiveness of reference between English and Romanian, to aspects of equivalence and translatability, as well as to the occurrence of translation universals.


Author(s):  
Gisèle Sapiro

Translation is a social activity that fulfills other functions than mere communication: political, economic and cultural. Thus translation can be used as a political weapon to export or import texts conveying an ideological message, such as socialist realism. As evidenced by the promotion of world bestsellers, translation may in other cases serve economic interests. Literary translations also serve cultural purposes, such as the building of collective (national, social, gendered) identities, the representations of other cultures, or the subversion of the dominant norms in a literary field (as defined by Pierre Bourdieu), which can be illustrated by the reception and uses of William Faulkner’s novels in France in the 1930s (namely by Jean-Paul Sartre). The study of translation has become a research field called “Translation Studies,” which underwent a “sociological turn” at the beginning of the 21st century, and was also renewed at the same time by the rise of “world literature” studies in comparative literature. While translation studies are interested in norms of translation (as defined by Gideon Toury), which may vary across cultures, especially between domesticating and foreignizing strategies, the sociology of translation and of (world) literature asks how literary texts circulate across cultures: who are the mediators? Why do they select certain texts and not others? What obstacles stand in the way of the transfer process? How are translations used as weapons in cultural struggles? The circulation of texts in translation can be studied through a quantitative analysis of flows of translation (across languages, countries, publishing houses) and through qualitative methods: interviews with specialized intermediaries and cultural mediators (publishers, translators, state representatives, literary critics), ethnographic observation (of book fairs, literature festivals), documentary sources (critical reception), archives (of publishers), and text analysis. However, internal (text analysis) and external (sociological) approaches still wait to be fully connected.


Arts ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (4) ◽  
pp. 108
Author(s):  
Pier Simone Pischedda

Linking interdisciplinarity and multimodality in translation studies, this paper will analyse the diachronic translation of English ideophones in Italian Disney comics. This is achieved thanks to the compiling of a bi-directional corpus of sound symbolic entries spanning six decades (1932–1992)—a corpus that was created following extensive archival work in various Italian and American libraries between 2014 and 2016. The central aim is to showcase practical examples coming from published comic scripts and to highlight patterns of translation in each of the five different time windows which were chosen according to specific historical, linguistic and cultural vicissitudes taking place in the Italian nation. Overall, the intention is to shed light on an under-developed area of studies that focuses on the cross-linguistical transposition of ideophonic forms in comic books and to pinpoint how greater factors might influence the treatment of such deceptively miniscule elements in the comic books’ pages.


2013 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
pp. 63-80
Author(s):  
Alice Leal

The tension between unity versus multiplicity seems to be at the heart of the European Union (EU) and of translation studies (TS). Indeed, a significant parallel between the two is the use of English as a lingua franca (ELF). The EU appears to be torn between a notion of language as a crucial element of one’s identity on the one hand, and a predominantly instrumental, Lockean view of language, on the other. A similar dynamic appears to take place in TS, an area that is par excellence heterogeneous and in which the notion of difference plays a paramount role. Indeed, at times TS appears to be afflicted by a sense of self-consciousness regarding its lack of unity and homogeneity. According to some, the solution is to foster the standardisation of its methods and terminology. But would proposing standardised terminology in a standardised language for the area not inevitably entail repressing different approaches in different languages? The paper explores this question in the context of the use of English as a lingua franca, and proposes various ways out of the dilemma both for the EU and TS.


2017 ◽  
Vol 61 (3) ◽  
pp. 553-577 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dimitris Asimakoulas

Translation studies researchers have for a long time critically engaged with the idea of translation being a mode of creative rewriting across media and cultural or temporal divides. Adaptation studies experts use a similar premise to study products, processes and reception of adaptations for specific locales. This article combines such perspectives in order to shed light on an under-researched area of comic adaptation: this is the metabase, or transfer, of Aristophanic comedies to the comic book format in Greek and their subsequent translation into English for an e-book edition (Metaichmio Publications 2012). The paper suggests a model for the close reading of creative transfer based on Lefèvre’s (2011; 2012) typology of formal properties of comics and Attardo’s (2002) General Theory of Verbal Humour. As is shown, visual rhythm and text-image relations create a rich environment for anachronism, parody, comic characterisation and ideological comments, all of which serve a condensed plot. The English translation rewrites cultural/ideological references, amplifies obscenity and emphasizes narrator visibility, always taking into consideration the mise en scène.


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