Read more
Zusammenfassung Text and Context celebrates Ian Mason's scholarship by bringing together fourteen innovative and original pieces of research by both young and established scholars, who examine different forms of translation and interpreting in a variety of cultural and geographical settings. Inhaltsverzeichnis Introduction Mona Baker, Maeve Olohan and María Calzada Pérez Part I: Language Matters 1. Expanded and Minimal Answers to Yes/No Questions in Interpreter-mediated Trials Cecilia Wadensjö, Sweden This article offers a comparative analysis of sequences drawn from two interpreter-mediated (Swedish-Russian) court trials, documented in Sweden. In single-language trials, defendants' ability to gain conversational space to expand a minimal answer heavily depends on the immediate sanction of the legal questioners. In interpreter-mediated court proceedings, however, the analysis suggests that the ability of foreign-language speaking defendants to expand a narrative is relatively independent of the direct sanctions of the questioners. Overall, the analysis indicates that, similarly to the strategies used by defendants to produce answers, questioning strategies used by legal questioners tend to function somewhat differently in face-to-face interpreter-mediated court trials, compared to single-language trials. This, it is assumed, must be explained by a range of linguistic and pragmatic factors. Those explored in this paper include the potentially increased multifunctionality of conversational units in interpreter-mediated encounters, the various means by which foreign-language defendants attempt to project further talk, the restricted immediate access of the legal questioners to these means, and the various ways in which interpreters may deal with the ambiguity of spontaneous spoken discourse. 2. Information Structure Management and Textual Competence in Translation and Interpreting Stuart Campbell, Ali Aldahesh, Alya' Al-Rubai'i, Raymond Chakhachiro & Berta Wakim, Australia & Iraq Information structure management is a key aspect of textual competence in translation and interpreting; a high degree of competence is marked by the ability to sequence elements in such a way that the target text looks stylistically authentic while maintaining the integrity of the information structure of the source text. The difficulty is accentuated when working into a second language, and where the source and target languages are structurally disparate. This study focuses on one aspect of information structure management, namely how Arabic speakers tackle sentence openings in translating and interpreting into English. Three student and three professional translators/interpreters were asked to generate output in three different production modes: fast translation, consecutive interpreting, and scaffolded speech, the latter providing baseline interlanguage output. Types of sentence openings were found to be markedly different in fast translation and consecutive interpreting, and to an extent between novices and experts. The findings are consistent with the predictions of the Translation-Interpreting Continuum (Campbell and Wakim 2007), a processing model which predicts that various translation and interpreting production modes rely on different kinds of mental representation, and that competence levels are distinguished by degree of automatization. Implications for curriculum design and assessment are discussed. II: Forms of Mediation 3. The Translator as Evaluator Theo Hermans, UK This essay explores approaches and concepts that enable us to capture the translator's presence in translated texts. One approach consists in contextualizing the individual form each translation assumes, as translators position themselves through the display of a particular mode of representation seen against the possibility of alternative modes . Other approaches are designed to tease out ...