Abstract

The global spread of English as a lingua franca (ELF) has caused a fundamental change to translation and interpreting (T&I). Translation and interpreting used to revolve around bilingual mediation between native speakers and native listeners. In interpreting, in particu­lar, more often than not, source speeches are now produced by non-native English speakers. The impact of this development has the potential to uproot our traditional understanding of T&I. This article sets out to describe how ELF or, more specifically, input produced by non-native English speakers under ELF conditions, differs from the native-speaker input, transla­tors and interpreters used to be dealing with. It gauges the consequences of these differences for translation and interpreting and examines how fundamental a change it is navigating between non-native speakers and listeners, as compared to the traditional situation of mediat­ing between speakers and listeners operating in their respective first languages. This culmi­nates in an exploration of the question as to whether there is reason to speak of a paradigm shift in translation and interpreting studies.

Highlights

  • Albl-MikasaZHAW Zurich University of Applied Sciences Theaterstrasse 15c — 8401 Winterthur, Switzerland

  • Paradigmatic shifts occur when accepted theoretical frameworks can no longer account for observable phenomena

  • These include the shifts from the text-oriented paradigm to process orientation in cognitive translation studies (Halverson 2020: 65), from statistical machine translation (SMT) to the neural machine translation (NMT) paradigm (Moorkens et al 2018), from instructivist learning to knowledge construction as part of the paradigm of communicative language teaching (Savignon 1983), and so on

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Summary

Albl-Mikasa

ZHAW Zurich University of Applied Sciences Theaterstrasse 15c — 8401 Winterthur, Switzerland. This article sets out to describe how ELF or, input produced by nonnative English speakers under ELF conditions, differs from the native-speaker input, translators and interpreters used to be dealing with. It gauges the consequences of these differences for translation and interpreting and examines how fundamental a change it is navigating between non-native speakers and listeners, as compared to the traditional situation of mediating between speakers and listeners operating in their respective first languages.

Introduction
How is ELF different?
Multilinguality
Culture
Source text/speech
A shift in paradigm for translation and interpreting studies?
Full Text
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