Abstract With the rapid development of digitisation and the dominance of social streaming platforms, the way we approach pedagogy for translation has changed significantly, especially under the circumstances of COVID-19. Teaching traditionally in the classroom seems insufficient to account for today’s overall distance learning atmosphere. Combined online and offline teaching models, this paper borrows the concept of “multimodality”, developed by Kress and van Leeuwen (2001, 4), to capture “when and how technologies are specialised or multi-purpose” in the application of remote teaching and learning for translation. Therefore, this article describes a teaching project which investigates the insights into three critical components inspired by non-professional subtitling and dubbing into a formal teaching context. These are a two-step pre-course preparation: a student-led questionnaire and an in-class quiz, the teamwork production of AVT works and a final post-reflection targeted at oral presentation and written review. Pedagogically, this collaborative approach enables students to improve translator competence, cultural awareness and technological capacities.

status: Published

Abstract Tourist promotional texts function like advertising texts in that they aim to “persuade, lure, woo, and seduce” (Dann 1996). In the context of global marketing, tourists can be considered consumers who seek to escape from ordinary life carrying their culturally embedded mindsets with them. Although cultural differences have been widely discussed in the literature on tourism translation, few studies have focused on the deeper level ‘out-of-awareness’ culture through which tourists travelling abroad interpret what they see. This paper investigates cultural localisation as a strategy to adapt the source text of a French wine tourism website to the hidden cultural values of British tourists in order to preserve the persuasive function of the target text. Using Hall’s anthropological iceberg model and Hofstede’s cultural dimensions as the framework, a small sample of French source texts and their English translations are compared to demonstrate the link between the stylistic features of tourism language and the psychological motivations of tourists, highlighting the interplay between all levels of the cultural iceberg. The findings suggest that culturally localised tourism websites are more likely to succeed as instruments of persuasion, with ego-targeting discussed as an effective strategy when adapting the text to appeal to the British market.

Abstract Traditionally, website translation has been considered a process moving from the global to the local, or from the major to the minor, and has largely been termed localization. Yet, the various meanings and interpretations of the term create the need for more specific terms that designate specific types of localization such as the cases where a locally generated website, created in a locale with ‘minor’ presence on the international market, needs to be provided in a language that is considered ‘major’ in cyberspace, e.g. websites into English as a lingua franca. In such cases, the website content transfer follows an opposite direction, i.e. from the local to the global. We would like to capitalize on the major-minor metaphor as a methodological tool for cases emerging as a quasi-opposite process to the prevailing conceptualization of localization, in an attempt to highlight differences which might justify new terminology. It will be argued that the concept of locale from which the term localization stems does not apply when a culturally undefined audience is addressed, and a new term will be proposed.

Abstract Advances in information technology and the needs of globalization made English the lingua franca (EFL) of the Web 1.0. Later, multi-modes of computer-mediated communication in the Web 2.0 fostered hybrid English as a new EFL by combing English with other languages. Moving into the Web 3.0 for information mining and knowledge acquisition without a language barrier, the author proposes ‘Webbish’, a controlled form of English, to write web texts for the purpose of gisting through the production of multilingual machine translation (MT) outputs. To demonstrate the effectiveness of ‘Webbish’, an empirical survey was conducted to measure the comprehensibility of the MT of ‘Webbish’ texts based on a 1–100 grading scale. An average score of 89.9 was earned from twenty-four international participants, showing a high degree of MT comprehensibility. Meanwhile, set within the framework of postmodernism, ‘Webbish’ writing takes on postmodernist significance of non-fixed norms, dynamic meanings and an equal right of comprehensible Web information access for global non-English audiences. Its linguistic features are suited to MT application and its fluid meanings are produced due to the MT system’s rendition and different target audiences’ different interpretations. ‘Webbish’ writing suggests acceptance, inclusiveness and equality. It is also an easy way to influence and improve global communication.

Abstract Japanese popular culture in the form of anime, manga, and videogames, enjoys significant popularity with diehard international fan groups, who have often become acquainted with aspects of Japanese culture through fan-translated media. However, this base of knowledgeable fans stands unique amongst standard translation practice, which seeks to iron out cultural specificities to create a text that reads flawlessly for a mass audience. This article therefore sets out to explain how videogame translators adopt targeted translation strategies to make their products more marketable to either a mass audience, the members of which may be ignorant, ambivalent, or even hostile to Japanese pop culture products, or to dedicated niche fan groups whose interest in Japan has been stoked by unofficial translations that frequently position themselves as the only avenue for accessing an “authentic” text. The final releases for eight pairs of Japanese games from the Role-Playing Game genre will be analysed to illustrate how far-reaching translation decisions have been used to make individual games more marketable to either group.

Abstract Using the Twitter hashtag #TorrentialDownpour, a vocal group of disgruntled, English-speaking gamers launched an attack in early 2016 protesting the localization changes made to the game Fire Emblem Fates. While dismissible as the latest “toxic technoculture” (Massanari 2015), the #TorrentialDownpour campaign’s claims are not unfounded; there are links between localization and censorship, in that both practices adapt texts moving between markets and cultures. This article draws from translation theory and observations of localization practice to problematize #TorrentialDownpour’s claims, and in the process address some of the most prevalent fallacies involving game localization: localization is not censorship; there is no better version; and one person is not ruining gamers’ fun.

Abstract From the perspective of Game Localisation (O’Hagan and Mangiron 2013, Bernal-Merino 2015), this paper examines the translation of Dante’s Inferno (Electronic Arts 2010) from English into Italian. Parallel excerpts from in-game dialogues are compared in order to analyse the relationship between the source and the target texts, while exploring the influence Dante’s masterpiece exerts on the Italian localisation. The objective is to show that, when a game is based on the target culture literature, the latter seems to constrain translation to ensure a successful local impact. As findings suggest, by means of quotations together with lexical, syntactic and stylistic choices, the Italian game is more literarily expressive than its English source, thus providing players with a multimedia interactive Dantesque experience.

The Chinese domesticating translation norms and Sino-centric values have been historically dominating print media translation in China, hindering the introduction of foreignness in the form of written text. Recent Sino-centric values in the Chinese translation field further hamper the introduction of foreign translation study methods. In this context, this paper looks at the non-localization strategy of Apple’s official websites; this strategy produces original English texts, such asiPhone, on the target website. It verifies the point that this strategy could effectively give foreignizing and challenging exceptions to how texts have been traditionally domesticated in China with strategies that sit in line with Chinese translation norms. That is to say, characterized by industrial natures of localization, internationalization and digital media, the implementation of non-localization strategy and the display of highly foreign non-localized texts on the Chinese site are almost under the control of source website owner, i.e. Apple Company. This non-localization strategy, therefore, has a foreignizing impact on the Chinese translation norm, due to its source-driven and digital-media based industrial nature. The cultural study of localization is necessary, as it greatly transcends instrumentalism, which could have implications on mainstream translation studies.