Translating literature into playability

In this paper, we show how a constraint-based approach influences the modeling of (1) preposition lexicalization and of (2) the choice of syntactic structure in natural language generation (in particuler in French). We concentrate on the linguistic description, which is the most challenging. The CSP procedures themselves are then rather straightforward. In the first case, preposition choice depends on the verb and its requirements, on the one hand, and the characteristics of the NP the preposition heads, on the other hand. In the second case, the choice of a particular syntactic structure depends on syntactic, semantic and pragmatic constraints on a verb, its arguments and on the parameters of the semantic representation. These dependencies may induce somewhat contradictory expectations. A constraint-based approach introduces a declarative model of these complex relations, allowing to identify all the possible (1) lexical choices or (2) syntactic structures which can be predicted from lexical descriptions.KeywordsSyntactic StructureConstraint Satisfaction ProblemNatural Language GenerationLinguistic DescriptionMovement VerbThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

Introduction. There are many theories of translation study. The Skopos theoryis a newbranch, which can explain and instruct many translation activities. It was established bythe German linguists H.Vermeer and K. Reib, who comprised the idea that translating andinterpreting should primarily take into account the function of the target text. This functionis specified by the addressee. This theory is based on the functional approach, whose aimis to dethrone the source text (ST). This is done by emphasizing the role of the translatoras a creator of the target text (TT) and giving priority to purpose of producing TT.Purpose. The paper aims at analysis of such basic concepts of the Skopos theoryas “functional principle”, “loyalty principle”, “coherence”, “translation types”, “intratextual andnon-textual factors”, “translation brief”, “translation problems”.Methods. The research is grounded on the following methods: the descriptive method,deductive and inductive methods, the method of generalization and grammatical transformations.Results. According to Skopos theory, the prime principle determining any translationprocess is the purpose of the overall translational action. The basic underlying “rules” of thetheory are the following: the brief translation, a term suggested by Skopos theory, a trunslatum(or TT) is determined by its Skopos; a TT is an offer of information in a target culture and TL(target language) concerning an offer of information in a source culture and SL (source language);а TT does not initiate an offer of information in a clearly reversible way; а TT must be internallycoherent; а TT must be coherent with the ST. There are also some criticisms of Skopos theory by other scholars. These include: not all actions have an intention; not every translation can beinterpreted as purposeful, having such a purpose would limit the possible translation proceduresand thus the interpretations of the TT; what is to be a “general” theory is in fact that only validfor nonliterary textsConclusion. Skopos theory claims to be general or universal model of translation.The main idea of skopos theory could be paraphrased as the translation purpose justifiesthe translation procedures. Like any other theories, Skopos theory is also not perfect, but itsknowledge is a essential component of the translators background knowledge.

Abstract: The present article focuses on some reflectionsabout the process of translation into Italian of the well-known Russian fairy tale by Aleksey Nikolaevich Tolstoy(1882-1945) Zolotoy klyuchik, ili Priklyucheniya Buratino(The Little Golden Key, or the Adventures of Burattino, 1935). Basing from the methodological point of view on some recent acquisitions of international TranslationTheory, we will examine the main “difficulties” or “challenges” for the translator present in the source text, such as anisomorphisms, linguistic connotations, neologisms, cultural realia and phraseologisms. We willalso consider the employment of different stylistic registersin the tale, often connected to the characters’ “expressiveaura” and to thick intertextual allusions to Russian Silver Age. Our lexical and stylistic choices in the translated text will be analyzed with regard to the dominants of the original work and to the specific characteristics of Russian(and Soviet) children literature of the time. Some solutionsproposed in the two published Italian versions of the 1980swill be also taken into account, questioning the opportunityand the main orientations of a new translation in relation to the kind of “implied readers” expected.

Translation ethics have been strictly defined as the practice to keep the meaning of the source text undistorted (Robinson, 2003, 25). Obviously, this notion of translation ethics is too restricted as the translator in specific cases is required to distort parts of meaning of the original text to live up to the audience expectations (Robinson, 2003, 26). Two opposing views of scholars with regard to translation ethics can clearly be identified. The first view is represented by Humboldt, for instance, who insists on the need for keeping the foreign elements found in the original text intact in the target text. Schleiermacher calls the translator to enable the target reader to hear the voice of the original writer, rather than the voices of any other party. Berman's method for preserving translation ethics is to advocate literal translation in order to respect the source text's form and content (Hermans, 2009, 97-98). The second view is held by Nord (1997) in his 'functionalist studies', which raise particular questions, such as what purpose the target text is meant to serve in the target culture and who is responsible for commissioning the translation. The present paper will argue that the translator should strike a balance between following ethical aspects of translation, especially those related to the transfer of form and content of the source text into the target language and producing a target text that can fulfil in the target language the appropriate function for which it has been produced.

Sentence shifts often occur when a sentence in the source language cannot be directly translated into the target language without altering the meaning or message of the source language. This research investigates sentence-level and its types of transpositions in The Book You Wish Your Parents Had Read and examines their influence on translation quality in terms of accuracy, acceptability, and readability. A qualitative method with a single-embedded case study design was used to gather the data from transposed sentences. Findings revealed a predominance of downward rank shifts (189 instances) over upward rank shifts (15 instances), indicating the translator’s tendency to simplify complex source structures into more concise target-language forms. The translation quality achieved high scores in accuracy (2.9) and readability (2.9), suggesting that the intended meaning was preserved and the text remained easy to comprehend. However, acceptability scored slightly lower (2.7), implying that some lexical and syntactic choices did not fully conform to the cultural and linguistic norms of the target language. With an overall mean score of 2.8, the translation is categorised as “good” but could be improved through refined vocabulary selection, enhanced idiomatic expressions, and greater cultural adaptation. These findings highlight the functional role of transposition in balancing semantic fidelity, naturalness, and clarity in English–Indonesian translation.

The higher output quality of neural machine translation (NMT) has fostered research into the possibility of using it for literary texts, leaving the translator the finishing touch through post-editing. However, as previous studies have shown (Moorkens et al.,, 2018; Guerberof-Arenas and Toral, 2020, 2022), the creativity that characterises literary translators’ reading and writing is hindered by the predominantly literal MT output. While subscribing to the idea of leaving the human translator in charge of literary texts, our article tests another use of technology—namely aligners and NMT to assist in the revision of previously published translations which show good quality and relevance to today’s world, yet contain factual errors, omissions, misinterpretations and dated lexical or syntactic choices. Two chapters from Sinclair Lewis’ The Job (1917) and Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962) were aligned with existing translations (Italian for the former, published in 1955 and 1970, and Finnish for the latter, published in 1963) and with the output produced by DeepL Pro to see whether some of its segments could replace the parts to be revised. Then, professionals working in literary translation were asked if 1) they were in favour of the use of technologies in the revision process, and 2) if the method we proposed was viable.

Radikan kavramı son dönemlerde özellikle de çağdaş sanatlar ve sosyoloji alanlarında sıkça kullanılan bir kavramdır. “Kök salma” olarak tanımlanan radikan aynı zamanda içerisinde değişim, gelişim ve ilerlemeyi de barındırmaktadır. Radikanda kökler ilk ortaya çıkışta değil sonradan oluşmaktadır çünkü radikan olan şey, farklı durumlar arasında hatta farklı dil, düşünce ve kültürler arasında bir geçiş yaparak ilerleyen, gelişen ve kök salandır. Radikanın doğasında hep bir ilerleme, gelişme ve bu yolla kök salma vardır. Radikan durumu aynı şekilde doğasında yer değiştirme, ilerleme, geçiş yapma ve gelişme olan dillerarası çeviride de kendini göstermektedir. Doğasında radikan olma durumu olan dillerarası çeviri sürecinden hareketle, çeviribilim açısından bakacak olursak çeviri kuramının da radikan olma özelliği gösterebileceğini söyleyebiliriz. Çeviribilim alanının en önemli kuramlarından biri olan Çoğuldizge Kuramı yazınsal metin çevirisi üzerine yoğunlaşan bir kuramdır. Kaynak bir dilde, belirli bir kültür için yazılmış olan orijinal metnin erek bir dil aracılığı ile erek kültüre aktarılması onun erek kültürdeki konumunu da belirlemektedir çünkü çeviri metin, erek kültürde merkez konuma gelip daha popüler bir durumda olabilir ve erek kültür yazınına katkıda bulunabilir. Hatta erek kültür yazınını etkisi altına alarak şekillendirebilir. Böylece erek kültürde yeni yazınsal türlerin ortaya çıkmasını veya onların daha popüler bir hale gelmesini sağlayabilir. Diğer bir deyişle, kaynak metin erek metne dönüşerek başka bir dil ve kültürde kök salıp gelişimine devam etmektedir. Kuramsal düzeydeki bu çalışmanın amacı, Çoğuldizge Kuramı’na radikan kavramı açısından farklı bir şekilde yaklaşarak kuramın radikan bir çeviri kuramı olduğunu göstermektir.

A basic goal of communication is for two or more people to construct mental representations that are shared in some way, and the most common means for this is everyday conversation. In conversation a speaker makes many expressive choices, and these choices are not arbitrary. The speaker’s lexical, syntactic, and prosodic choices reflect, among other things, her mental model of the situation under discussion and her attentional focus over this model.

The main objective is basic research and system development leading to (1) characterization of information carried by (a) syntax, semantics, and discourse structure, (b) their relation to information carried by intonation, and (c) development of methods for using this information for generation and understanding; (2) development of architectures for integration of utterance planning with lexical, syntactic and intonational choice; (3) development of incremental strategies for using syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic knowledge in understanding and generating language.

Partindo da hipótese de que as reflexões propostas por Bakhtin e pelo Círculo podem ajudar-nos a refletir sobre as questões que se colocam no campo da Aquisição da Linguagem, e considerando que há poucos registros no Brasil de trabalhos desenvolvidos dentro dessa perspectiva, pretendemos, neste artigo, ao pensar a constituição da criança na linguagem, no período de aquisição, discutir as noções de "sujeito", "subjetividade", "individualidade" e "singularidade". A fim de visualizar melhor essa discussão, traremos os dados de fala de crianças pequenas, entre 1;8 e 3 anos, filmadas em contextos naturais de interação com pais e familiares. Com base neles, pudemos verificar, entre outras questões, que a criança, sujeito que se constitui na e pela língua(gem), imprime em suas produções marcas que revelam sua subjetividade (seja por escolhas lexicais, morfológicas, sintáticas, de gênero etc.).

As a scientist employed by an industry, you would have a vested interest in the sale of its products. You might hope that consumers would benefit, but profit would be uppermost on your mind. If you were a researcher at a medical center, you might hope to profit from what you discovered: to take out a patent on a medical device or a mutant bacterium. Nevertheless, you would need to impress on your fellow researchers that uppermost on your mind was not profit, but the advance of knowledge. To communicate this mandatory attitude toward your work — this stance — your prose would adopt a characteristic voice, a particular pattern of syntactic and lexical semantic choices. For example, Everett et al. (2010) present positive findings for rosuvastatin, a drug designed to lower cholesterol but tested to prevent stroke in their JUPITER trial. These authors’ claims, however, are mitigated by a serious limitation — a meta-analysis showed that their findings in favor of rosuvastatin for stroke prevention did not differ significantly from the use of other statins. Given these results, these authors exhibit the tentativeness of their findings while maintaining face with statements such as (1): (1) Given the net benefit of statin therapy observed in our updated meta-analysis, it is possible that any apparent differences between JUPITER and each of the prior trials may simply reflect the play of chance.

Investigating translation shifts in the translation of news articles has not received much attention despite its paramount importance in how translators produce adequate translations. Indeed, news translation is considered to be understudied in the field of translation. The current research aims at identifying the types of category shifts that have occurred and the most employed ones in the selected corpus.This study offers also an understanding of the category shifts that occur concerning translating news reports or stories. Accordingly, the study will explore the translation of a news article from English into Arabic; the news article titled ‘North Korea ‘preparing rocket launch’, images suggest’ is published on BBC news website 9 March 2019 together with its translation which was found on the BBC Arabic news website. To attain the research objectives, a comparative investigation of the English source text and the Arabic target text will be needed to look into the use of category shifts following Catford’s typology of category shifts. This study adopted a qualitative and quantitative method in identifying what kinds of category shifts occurred and the most frequent ones in the analyzed news text. The findings show that all types of category shifts were employed in the translation with a total of 35 shifts. The most employed type of category shift is structural shifts which are exemplified through 16 cases. These structural shifts are illustrated in word-order, passive-active, or nominal-verbal sentence structures. The least applied category shifts in the process of translation are class shifts which indicate that the translator found target text equivalences that have the same part of speech of the source text items. The study concludes that category shifts were employed in the translation to fill the linguistic gap between the two languages.

For many years translation was viewed as a faithful equivalent substitute for the source text. The cultural turn of the 1980s heralded a move on the part of contemporary translation studies away from the straightjacket of the earlier prescriptive and normative approaches. Two approaches to translation, the functionalist and the descriptive, developed independently but simultaneously and dethroned the primacy of the source text. Both proposed translation as a new communicative act that must fulfil a purpose for the target culture, so that target texts could potentially differ significantly from source texts. The establishment of postcolonial translation studies in the mid-1990s led to translations created to benefit the culture of the colonised at the expense of the culture of the coloniser/imperialist. The objective of this study is to indicate by means of critical analysis of several translations how a dominated target culture is rehabilitated, how a dominant source culture is subverted and how a dominant target culture is resisted by means of maintenance of the dominated source culture.

This article presents an overview of world literature with regards to comparative and translation studies, notably through the publications of André Lefevere, Susan Bassnett and Edwin Gentzler, as an introduction to this thematic special issue, which showcases the variety of approaches and interests in literature by translation scholars. Although literary translation accounts for a small percentage of all the translation work carried out in the world, it continues to attract considerable attention on the part of academics and researchers. This interest is partly a result of the change of status of translated works since the mid-twentieth century, as translation research was gradually accepted as crucial by comparatists. The articles selected for this thematic issue, which look at literary translation in China, Latin America, Europe and India, analyze some important topics such as the role of translators as initiators of the translation process, the imprint they leave on the target texts and on the target cultures, the translation of gender and the significance of translation projects.

This paper examines the strategies adopted by Arab translators to contextualize Disney comics within the Arab culture, with particular reference to Egyptian and Gulf translators. The researcher attempts to establish the ways in which Arab translators, working under the supervision of three major publishing houses in the Arab world, intervene to adapt the source text to the target context and culture. The researcher also attempts to analyse the way Disney characters have been portrayed in the target text and examines the new dimensions added to Disney characters’ performance, actions, speech, etc. in the translated context.