This study focuses on the translation of Sol Plaatje’s Mhudi from English into Setswana. Studies have suggested that though written in English, Mhudi is heavily influenced by the author’s Setswana culture. It is for this reason that the translation of such a novel into Setswana has been seen as a form of cultural back-translation or repatriation. The concept of repatriation refers to a situation in which a source text written about a particular community in a language which is foreign to that community gets translated into the language of that community. This concept has recently become an area of interest in translation studies, but there is still a dearth of literature on the subject. It is in this regard that this study seeks to analyze the context in which Mhudi was translated into Setswana and the actions of the translator during the translation process. Using agency as a theoretical framework, the study investigates the translator’s strategies in translating culture-specific terms as well as the social factors that might have influenced his actions. The study is qualitative in nature, and data was collected through a comparative analysis of the source and target texts. The study is significant in shedding light on the concept of repatriation and its application in translation studies.

Color similes are widely used in English to describe the actual meaning of color or to depict it figuratively. This study investigates how native Indonesian speakers perceive color similes when they are translated from English into Indonesian. It also aims to identify the most effective or the most acceptable translation strategies for translating color similes. The study was conducted by administering a questionnaire to 50 native Indonesian speakers regarding the translation of color similes. For each simile, the questionnaire presented three translation versions: retention of the same image, replacement of the image with a different image, and reduction of the simile, if idiomatic, to its sense. The participants were asked to choose the translated version based on three levels of acceptability: acceptable, fairly acceptable, and unacceptable. The questionnaire consisted of 25 similes containing the basic colors of black, white, brown, green, and red. The results of the study show that most of the basic colors in English and Indonesian share the same metaphorical meaning. However, the images used in the English similes are not all acceptable in Indonesian. The translation strategy that is considered most effective is the reduction of the simile, if idiomatic, to its sense. The factors that affect the acceptability of color simile translations are exposure to English in daily activities, media exposure about popular culture, religious beliefs, general knowledge of ecology, culture-specific phenomena, educational backgrounds, and the uniqueness of languages.

This paper aims to investigate the effect of error annotation on post-editing effort and post-edited product. The study also attempts to highlight the significance of quality evaluation, particularly error annotation, which, I believe, is a useful method for learning how to work with machine translation (MT). In order to accomplish these goals, ten translation students were divided into two groups—a control group and a treatment group—in an experimental study. The control group post-edited the machine-translated subtitles of an educational video while the treatment group performed a quality evaluation prior to the task of post-editing the same content. Temporal and technical effort data (Krings 2001) of students were gathered to measure whether there was a significant difference between the two groups. In addition, the end products were examined to see if quality evaluation had a different impact on the post-editing decisions of the treatment group compared to the control group. The results show that there is a significant difference in temporal effort between the two groups—the treatment group completing the post-editing task faster—and the control group expended more technical effort than the treatment group, though the difference was not significant. The treatment group also displayed a tendency to use MT and edit more efficiently than the control group.

As museums increasingly seek to engage diverse and global audiences, the role of translation in the presentation of exhibits and the transmission of cultural and historical narratives becomes pivotal. This article explores the interdisciplinary research field of museum translation, using the Ulster Museum as a case study. The aim of this study is to identify the neglect of translation service within museum contexts and emphasize the significant role of translation in enhancing visitor experience. I begin by mapping the scholarly research in museum translation. It is evident that translation, despite its significance, remains underemphasized within museum contexts, with detrimental consequences for visitor engagement and access to cultural exhibitions. The Ulster Museum, an iconic institution in Northern Ireland, is examined in detail to identify areas for potential improvement in its translation services. Through analyzing the text in the Chinese Museum Map, I identify translation issues and offer coping strategies with the potential to not only overcome language barriers but also enhance the overall museum service. Ultimately, I emphasize the important role of translation in museums in enhancing accessibility and visitor experience. This study contributes to ongoing research in the field and calls for future investigations into effective translation methods and their impact on enriching the museum experience for diverse audiences.

Translation from one language to another is as much a compromise between two lexicons as it is a negotiation between two cultures. Translating culture is no easy feat, but when this is done in the context of film, and the constraints of subtitling come into play, the difficulty of the process is exacerbated. This article analyzes the strategies which have been utilized to translate into English the French culture-specific terms in Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s French romantic comedy Le Fabuleux Destin d’Amélie Poulain. In so doing, the study seeks to ascertain how foreign culture is represented in the film and whether the English-subtitled version of the original diminishes the experience or whether it adds another dimension to it. To this end, the study relies on Jan Pedersen’s taxonomy of ECR transfer strategies as well as his classification of cultural domains. It is found that the English subtitle version’s main aim was to render the movie comprehensible to the Anglophone viewer and less so to reflect French culture, a job left mainly to the cinematography and the music of the film. The translator manages nevertheless to maintain a level of cultural authenticity by using a specific translation strategy. The result is one which allows the non-French speaking viewer not only to comprehend a relatively complex dialogue and plot, but also to experience the French cultural magic intended to be conveyed.

In a rapidly evolving language services landscape where the boundaries between translation, revision, and post-editing are becoming increasingly blurred, this article provides a state-of-the-art review on the intricate relationship between human translators and Neural Machine Translation (NMT). While acknowledging the significant advancements made in the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI) applied to automatic language processing, we want to emphasize the pressing need to reassert the value of human translators over unconscious algorithms that automatically generate translations. This paper also highlights the synergy between human skills and technology, positioning NMT as a key additional tool in a translator's toolkit that enhances both speed and efficiency to meet the exponentially growing demand for translation services and to cope with the ever-tightening deadlines. Nevertheless, considering the ambivalent effects of NMT on the quality of the final product, we advocate for the informed and responsible use of machine translation (MT) tools by both professionals and translation students. Furthermore, we believe that beyond fostering MT literacy, translation trainers may play a crucial role in nurturing adaptability in future translators, equipping them with the necessary skills and tools to confidently navigate the latest and emerging technologies-such as interactive and adaptive MT tools or chatbots-in order to secure them a competitive advantage in the translation industry.

This study aims to provide a descriptive account of the translational aspects of Reşat Nuri Güntekin’s (1889–1956) Gizli El (The secret hand) (1924/1954). Given its publication history from the Ottoman Turkish alphabet into the Latin alphabet and the claims on it in the Turkish cultural and literary system, the study is set to explore what Gizli El could offer new regarding the concepts of self-translation and indirect translation in intralingual context, which it encompasses altogether. Employing a descriptive target-oriented, historical approach to the translational phenomena in question, the study uses “textual” and “extratextual sources” (Toury 2012, 87–88). While the textual analysis involves intralingual comparison of the Ottoman Turkish and the Latin-alphabet versions of Gizli El published in book form in 1924 and 1954, respectively, the extratextual analysis mainly covers Reşat Nuri’s prefaces. Through such analyses, Reşat Nuri’s “assumed” (Toury 2012) intralingual translations of Gizli El yield a new conceptualization of self-translation in terms of the source and (in)directness of self-translation: ‘direct self-translation’ and ‘indirect self-translation.’ Reframing many aspects of self-translation and indirect translation in terms of their natures, scopes, categorizations, motives, and functions, as well as the longtime debates on ‘authority’ and closeness to ‘original,’ the study concludes by highlighting the historicity and relativity of any work, phenomenon, and concept in nature and scope, reiterating the call “to possess the problematic facts but to disown the problematic definitions” (Bengi 1990, 230).

The aim of this article is to investigate translation trainees’ perceived difficulties and benefits of a post-editing oriented neural machine translation (NMT) error annotation and quality evaluation task which was carried out for the language pair English-Turkish and for two separate text types and domains, i.e., environmental blogs and movie/TV reviews, within the scope of an MA course on translation quality standards. The data to be analyzed were collected through a semi-structured questionnaire which was given to the trainees attending the course after the completion of the task. The questionnaire was prepared with the aim of understanding perceived difficulties and benefits of the task. Analysis of the answers revealed that most of the trainees were in the opinion that the task was difficult. Majority of the trainees also believed that the task was beneficial and enabled them to feel empowered to make decisions on human translation quality evaluation of machine translation (MT) and to carry out error annotation and post-editing activities in the future. According to a significant number of trainees, error annotation facilitated their post-editing process and reduced the effort in post-editing. Enhanced understanding of MT error annotation and enhanced ability to perform post-editing were the significant benefits stated by the trainees. The difficulties were associated with being introduced and assigned to perform tasks they were not familiar with. Yet, as displayed in the answers to the questionnaire, a considerable majority of the trainees were positive about the learning experience. The results have also shown that integration of MT-related activities into translator training with a focus on the empowerment of the human translator has its difficulties and benefits also for translation trainers. While the difficulties for the trainers concern the decisions on the design, implementation, and planning of the task and the responsibility to carry out the task in constant interaction and collaboration with the trainees, the benefits are the sense of fulfillment and enrichment brought by positive feedback from the trainees and the discovery of the fact that the so-called ‘teaching experience’ becomes a ‘learning experience’ for trainers as well as trainees.

Statistical Machine Translation (SMT) has been the dominant corpus-based machine translation (MT) approach in the last twenty years. While SMT has been studied in detail among European languages, it has not been studied sufficiently in language pairs including Turkish as source or target language, and its study has been limited mostly to English ↔ Turkish language pair. This study aims to broaden the perspective on Turkish corpus-based MT studies by training MT engines between Turkish and a wide variety of languages with different features. It surveys customized SMT between Turkish and 11 different languages. Twenty-two SMT engines have been trained in KantanMT with open parallel corpora using Turkish as both source and target language. Three automatic evaluation metrics F-Measure, BLEU, and TER have been used for evaluating MT quality. Due to the variations in the corpus quality and size, highly varying results have been achieved. While Turkish ↔ Catalan engines have had the highest automatic evaluation scores, Turkish ↔ Arabic engines have had the lowest automatic scores. While the quality results are highly varying across languages, we obtain baseline scores for a wide variety of languages coupled with Turkish. These results may provide a reference point for evaluating future MT systems including Turkish.

The purpose of this study is to scrutinize the implications that The Canterbury Tales: A Retelling (2009) by Peter Ackroyd and its Turkish translation hold for Translation Studies. The study will focus on the translation concepts of ‘retelling,’ ‘intralingual translation,’ ‘indirect translation,’ and ‘retranslation.’ The motivation for this study stems from the manner in which the books were introduced into the English and Turkish literary systems. The Turkish translation entitled Geoffrey Chaucer’ın Canterbury Hikâyeleri (Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury tales) (2017) designates Peter Ackroyd as the ‘author,’ and is presented as a “translat[ion] from the English original” (Ackroyd 2017, 5). In the English edition, on the other hand, Ackroyd appears as the ‘translator’ of this “original,” with Chaucer named as the ‘author.’ Another noteworthy point is that Geoffrey Chaucer’ın Canterbury Hikâyeleri was preceded by other translations of Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales in Turkish. The current study explores how to conceptualize the translational statuses of The Canterbury Tales: A Retelling and Geoffrey Chaucer’ın Canterbury Hikâyeleri through discussing the existing definitions of ‘retelling,’ ‘intralingual translation,’ ‘indirect translation,’ and ‘retranslation.’ This study argues that the English work is, in fact, an ‘intralingual (re)translation,’ and the Turkish work can be called both an ‘indirect translation’ and a ‘retranslation through indirect translation,’ where ‘indirect’ refers to the process. Along with this, it also offers two new categories for the typology of “intervening texts” in retranslation (Alvstad and Rosa 2015): ‘single intralingual retranslation’ and ‘compilative inter- and intralingual retranslation through indirect retranslation.’ The study ends with a discussion of the implications of the English and Turkish works in question with regard to the ideas of ‘originality’ and ‘authorship.’