Acceptable Translation Research Articles

Weber's sociology—‘verstehend’ or ‘deutend’?

When translating Max Weber's methodological writings, I had to consider the (de)merits of the ‘received’ translation of ‘verstehende Soziologie’ as ‘interpretive sociology’; and this led me to the present, detailed study of Weber's discussion and use of the terms ‘Verstehen’ and ‘Deuten’. I conclude that, although, in Weber's work, ‘Verstehen’ and ‘Deuten’ form a sort of methodological amalgam, ‘Deuten’ typically indicates a necessary process having ‘Verstehen’ as its result. The examination of Weber's use of the two terms also raises doubts as to the implications of the subcategory of ‘aktuelles Verstehen’ discussed in Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft. Finally, it emerges that Weber himself was far from consistent in his use of ‘Verstehen’ and ‘Deuten’. Against this background, ‘interpretive sociology’ seems to be a perfectly acceptable translation of what Weber meant by ‘verstehende Soziologie’, and one may even feel that regrettable misunderstandings might have been avoided if Weber himself had chosen to describe his sociology as ‘deutend’ rather than as ‘verstehend’.

Translation Evaluation: The Suitability of the Argument Macrostructure Model for the Assessment of Translated Texts across Different Fields

<p>Even though there exists an undeniable need for an acceptable translation among translators, translation scholars and translation teachers, the question of acceptability and the criteria against which this acceptability can be determined are still controversial. There is a lack of generally agreed criteria against which translation can possibly be evaluated, despite the fact that international as well as local standards of translation are clearly witnessed. In spite of the fact that some scholars suggest certain parameters that can be utilized for the purpose of translation evaluation, such as quality of TL, accuracy, register, appearance of TT, situationality, and so on, there seems to be no parameter on which evaluators may rely to arrive at an overall quality assessment for the TT. The present paper argues that the argument macrostructure model should be utilised as a translation evaluation parameter to determine the translation quality. This model should comprise several standards and grades peculiar to different translation contexts and situations, so that it can successfully be applied in the case of assessing translation materials within both academic as well as professional settings.</p><p> </p>

Sign Language, Performance, and Identity

The article presents an introduction to issues of Deaf identity, especially in relation to performance in Bible translation into sign languages. Deaf people become visible as Deaf at the moment they start to speak their language. The communicative performance of sign language is what gives them their identity as Deaf persons. In an intersemiotic translation, the translator-signer presents three visible layers of identities: one is him- or herself as a Deaf person, the other two are the narrator and the characters represented in the text. To achieve an acceptable translation, the translator must choose the most relevant strategies regarding these identities; otherwise, the translation becomes vulnerable to the criticism of the Deaf community because, in the translation, the first of these identities is visibly attached to the signer’s own personal identity, including his or her physical appearance and ethical behavior.

Venuti versus Nida

In western translation theories, Lawrence Venuti and Eugene Nida appear to be standing at too opposing poles regarding the equivalence theory, and are notable for their prominent disagreement on the issue. Their theories diverge in their responses to equivalence, and disagree, essentially, on the functions of translation as well as the aspects of an acceptable translation. This disagreement unfolded itself clearly during a conference at Binghamton University in 1991. In this essay, I intend to juxtapose the exceptionally different theoretical approaches of these two prominent translation scholars. I also intend to show how Venuti’s views on translation in practice challenges Nida’s theoretical approaches to translation, and surprisingly enough his own theories particularly speaking, foreignizing and domesticating translations in which he has been extensively engaged. Finally I intend to show how Venuti’s practice of translation challenges his earlier attack on Nida’s conceptions of the “dynamic equivalence,” “naturalness of expression” (Nida 1964: 159) and the notion of “the equivalent effect” (de Waard & Nida 1986: 9).

Lost in Translation: Case Study of Interpreting American SBUs by Russian EFL Learners Majoring in Linguistics

The paper investigates difficulties Russian EFL learners have in interpreting American situation-bound utterances (SBUs). A case study involving 75 linguistics students translating SBUs is described. Their acceptable translations and mistakes in the interpretation of SBUs are analyzed and recommendations to improve teaching translation are given. A classification of SBUs is worked out for this purpose.

Translation Studies and Language Teacher Training

Abstract. Oral and written translation has always been one of the most important ways of communication as people of the world use different languages in different places. The history of translation goes back to around the first century B. C. in Iran, India and Egypt. Translation has actually found its way very cleverly and silently in the course of history for peacefully penetrating into the hearts of other cultures, customs, traits and even societies by changing and enriching them and has always been working as a very valuable factor for globalism and strengthening the pillars of international peace and friendship and can serve as a means of reducing religious and racial differences. (Toossi, 2014)In this paper the researcher will explain the theories of good and acceptable translation. He also gives some examples of effects of translation of Eastern literature on the west and vice versa and the great changes made by translation in different societies. Finally some suggestions for training better language instructors and better translators will be given and explained.

Dutch-Flemish translation of nine pediatric item banks from the Patient-Reported Outcomes Measurement Information System (PROMIS)®.

PurposeThe Patient-Reported Outcomes Measurement Information System (PROMIS®) is a new, state-of-the-art assessment system for measuring patient-reported health and well-being of adults and children. It has the potential to be more valid, reliable, and responsive than existing PROMs. The items banks are designed to be self-reported and completed by children aged 8–18 years. The PROMIS items can be administered in short forms or through computerized adaptive testing. This paper describes the translation and cultural adaption of nine PROMIS item banks (151 items) for children in Dutch–Flemish.MethodsThe translation was performed by FACITtrans using standardized PROMIS methodology and approved by the PROMIS Statistical Center. The translation included four forward translations, two back-translations, three independent reviews (at least two Dutch, one Flemish), and pretesting in 24 children from the Netherlands and Flanders.ResultsFor some items, it was necessary to have separate translations for Dutch and Flemish: physical function—mobility (three items), anger (one item), pain interference (two items), and asthma impact (one item). Challenges faced in the translation process included scarcity or overabundance of possible translations, unclear item descriptions, constructs broader/smaller in the target language, difficulties in rank ordering items, differences in unit of measurement, irrelevant items, or differences in performance of activities. By addressing these challenges, acceptable translations were obtained for all items.ConclusionThe Dutch–Flemish PROMIS items are linguistically equivalent to the original USA version. Short forms are now available for use, and entire item banks are ready for cross-cultural validation in the Netherlands and Flanders.

Register Allocation for QEMU Dynamic Binary Translation Systems

Binary translation is an important step to solve the code migration, QEMU is more advanced and efficient binary translation system. It uses lighter TCG technology to achieve dynamic binary translation but analysis of the TCG internal process, we found that the excessive use of temporary variables meaningless in the TCG intermediate code, the backend generates host code does not take into account the efficient use of registers. Through these two aspects of improvement, especially increased a linear scan register allocation algorithm in the back-end, can be in an acceptable translation time, generates efficient host code. The experimental results show that the optimized program run time significantly reduced and the amount of generated host code reduced by an average of 8%.

Translation and cultural adaptation with specific reference to Tshivenda and English: a case of medical terms and expressions

This article investigated the challenges encountered by translators when translating medical terms from English into Tshivenda and vice versa. The article revealed that translators face a major difficulty with regard to a lack of terminology in Tshivenda. This often results in mistranslation and miscommunication. In addition, the article showed that cultural differences pose a serious challenge to translators. Translators need an in-depth knowledge of languages and their cultures in order to produce acceptable translations. Lastly, the article proposed effective translation strategies and procedures to render a translated medical text meaningful to the target audience.

Optimality in Sesotho Translation

Sesotho translators sometimes fall short to express optimally acceptable translations. The objective of this paper is therefore to demonstrate the translator's role in constituting an optimally and culturally acceptable translation. In terms of the optimality theory, the translator has to deal effectively and efficiently with the emerging translation challenges. Translation identifies itself as a decision-making process. The translator has to undertake conscious decisions throughout the translation process to meet the needs of his target readership. With a view to develop a meaningful translation, decisions should be based on identified variables and ordered in a particular sequence. The results in this paper proof that failure to deal with the constraints effectively may eventually culminate in the production of a translation of poor quality. It may, perhaps, even operate against the loyalty principle towards the intended target readership. Otherwise, optimality in translation is based on the premise that a good translation is associated with good translator's decisions regarding the text type, intended target readers, the context and the purpose of translation. It is only in this context that a functionally and culturally acceptable translation is delivered. Such an optimal translation is socially expected to be linguistically accessible to its intended readers. The paper suggests strong recommendations on the part of Sesotho translators to mind taking meaningful decisions so as to ensure that they produce optimal Sesothotranslations.

Attitude Ascriptions and Acceptable Translations

Over a number of years, Mark Richard has developed an influential account of propositional attitude ascription. The account is motivated primarily by the apparent contextual shiftiness of attitude ascriptions. An attitude ascription is to be deemed true just in case it provides an acceptable translation of an appropriate mental representation – where what counts as an acceptable translation depends on context. The account itself perhaps receives its most comprehensive treatment in Richard (1990); but it is independently developed, defended and discussed in a number of individual articles. Thirteen such articles have now been collected together, along with an introductory essay that details a number of recent developments of Richard’s views.1 Roughly speaking, the essays in the collection form two groups. Seven of the essays chart the development and defence of Richard’s account, both before and after Richard (1990). The remaining six essays tackle more general issues relating to attitude ascriptions – such as propositional quantification, semantic pretence, negative existentials, intensional transitives, tensed beliefs and the role of sense in opaque contexts – , albeit with Richard’s account generally playing a prominent role in the discussion. On the whole, the collection provides an excellent example of Richard’s rigorous and insightful philosophy. It is recommended for any advanced student or professional working within the philosophies of language or mind.

Dutch–Flemish translation of 17 item banks from the Patient-Reported Outcomes Measurement Information System (PROMIS)

The Patient-Reported Outcomes Measurement Information System (PROMIS(®)) is a new, state-of-the-art assessment system for measuring patient-reported health and well-being of adults and children that has the potential to be more valid, reliable and responsive than existing PROMs. The PROMIS items can be administered in short forms or, more efficiently, through computerized adaptive testing. This paper describes the translation of 563 items from 17 PROMIS item banks (domains) for adults from the English source into Dutch-Flemish. The translation was performed by FACITtrans using standardized methodology and approved by the PROMIS Statistical Center. The translation included four forward translations, two back-translations, three to five independent reviews (at least two Dutch, one Flemish) and pre-testing in 70 adults (age range 20-77) from the Netherlands and Flanders. A small number of items required separate translations for Dutch and Flemish: physical function (five items), pain behaviour (two items), pain interference (one item), social isolation (one item) and global health (one item). Challenges faced in the translation process included: scarcity or overabundance of possible translations, unclear item descriptions, constructs broader/smaller in the target language, difficulties in rank ordering items, differences in unit of measurement, irrelevant items or differences in performance of activities. By addressing these challenges, acceptable translations were obtained for all items. The methodology used and experience gained in this study can be used as an example for researchers in other countries interested in translating PROMIS. The Dutch-Flemish PROMIS items are linguistically equivalent. Short forms will soon be available for use and entire item banks are ready for cross-cultural validation in the Netherlands and Flanders.

Cultural Adaptation in IRIB’s Dubbing The case of “Due South” series, episode 65

Dubbing is the main mode of audiovisual translations which is used on IRIB (Iran’s national TV) for transferring and broadcasting foreign series such as "Due South". Given priority to the target culture (that is Iranian culture), IRIB's policy is to filter and transfer foreign assumptions and values; so, the main strategies in IRIB's dubbing may match well with Schleiermacher’s (1998) concepts of "domestication" in order to create what Toury (1980) calls "acceptable translation" which is "oriented towards the norms of the target culture" (Agost, 2001, p. 71). In this way, some adaptations were observed to change the story, so the original dialogues of one episode of "Due South" with its Persian dubbed dialogues were examined sentence by sentence in order to find cases which are domesticated, and the possible cultural reasons behind them were discussed. The result seems to be a strategy of violating the main plot and changing the whole story of this episode, and ignoring the viewers' expectations.

IS IT THE LINGUISTIC OR FUNCTIONAL APPROACH TO BE APPLIED IN TRANSLATION?

This article aims at critically analyzing the different approaches conducted by the structuralist and the scopos theory in tranlstaing. The former emphasized the equivalence in producing good translation, however the later deals mosty not only the equaivalence, in producing acceptable translation, but the requirement and condition of the Target Language must be taken into account

“ὅτι πνευµατικῶς ἀνακρίνεται”

Abstract Most English translations of and commentaries on Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians interpret the final clause of 1 Cor 2:14 causally: the psychic man is unable to know the things of God’s pneuma “because they are pneumatically examined.” Due to the flexibility of the Greek, however, three alternative, grammatically acceptable translations exist. Although the causal interpretation is supported by later Christian interpreters of the first centuries CE, Paul’s own grammatical preferences, the surrounding context of 1 Cor 2:6-16, and philosophical parallels contemporary with Paul’s thought suggest that the following translation best reflects Paul’s intentions: “the psychic man is unable to know that he is pneumatically examined.”

HPSG-Based Preprocessing for English-to-Japanese Translation

Japanese sentences have completely different word orders from corresponding English sentences. Typical phrase-based statistical machine translation (SMT) systems such as Moses search for the best word permutation within a given distance limit (distortion limit). For English-to-Japanese translation, we need a large distance limit to obtain acceptable translations, and the number of translation candidates is extremely large. Therefore, SMT systems often fail to find acceptable translations within a limited time. To solve this problem, some researchers use rule-based preprocessing approaches, which reorder English words just like Japanese by using dozens of rules. Our idea is based on the following two observations: (1) Japanese is a typical head-final language, and (2) we can detect heads of English sentences by a head-driven phrase structure grammar (HPSG) parser. The main contributions of this article are twofold: First, we demonstrate how off-the-shelf, state-of-the-art HPSG parser enables us to write the reordering rules in an abstract level and can easily improve the quality of English-to-Japanese translation. Second, we also show that syntactic heads achieve better results than semantic heads. The proposed method outperforms the best system of NTCIR-7 PATMT EJ task.

Coping with extreme speech conditions in simultaneous interpreting

This study addresses the strategies used by simultaneous interpreters when confronted with syntactically complex sentences and with a high speed of delivery. The material consists of recordings of fifteen professional interpreters rendering two passages (one with a complex sentence structure, the other with a high speed of delivery) from French into Dutch. Most, but not all, interpreters managed to produce an acceptable translation. In the case of the complex passage, most interpreters opted for a segmentation strategy, while a few applied a tailing strategy. In the case of the high delivery speed, most opted for a tailing strategy, but a few applied segmentation.

Statistical translation with scarce resources: A south african case study

Statistical machine translation techniques offer great promise for the development of automatic translation systems. However, the realization of this potential requires the availability of significant amounts of parallel bilingual texts. This paper reports on an attempt to reduce the amount of text that is required to obtain an acceptable translation system, through the use of active and semi- supervised learning. Systems were built using resources collected from South African government websites and the results evaluated using a standard automatic evaluation metric (BLEU). We show that significant improvements in translation quality can be achieved with very limited parallel corpora, and that both active learning and semi-supervised learning are useful in this context.

Samtliche Orgelwerke (review)

Johann Gottfried Walther. Samtliche Orgeiwerke. Herausgegeben von Klaus Beckmann. Wiesbaden: Breitkopf & Hartel, c1998-99. [Vol. 1: Freie Orgelwerke; Konzerttranskriptionen. Introd. in Ger., Eng., p. 4-7; score, p. 8-153; Revisionsbericht, p. 154-60. ISMN M004-18042-6; Edition Breitkopf 8678. DM 59. Vol. 2: Choralbearbeitungen A-G. Introd. in Ger., Eng., 2 p.; score, p. 7-143; Revisionsbericht, p. 144-54. ISMN M-004-1 8047-1; Edition Breitkopf 8679. DM 59. Vol. 3; Choralbear-beitungen H-M. Introd. in Ger., Eng., 2 p.; 1 plate; score, p. 8-153; Revisionsbericht, p. 154-64. ISMN M-004-180461-7; Edition Breitkopf 8680. DM 59. Vol. 4: Choralbearbeitungen N-Z. Introd. in Ger., Eng., 2 p.; 1 plate; score, p. 8-144; Revisionsbericht, p. 145-55. ISMN M-004-18069-3; Edition Breitkopf 8681. DM 59.] Continuing its impressive publications of music by the North-German organ masters, Breitkopf & Hartel has recently published a new, four-volume edition of the collected organ works of Johann Gottfried Walther (1684-1748) under the editorship of Klaus Beckmann, which now supersedes Heinz Lohmann's three-volume edition of Walther's selected organ works (Ausgewahlte Orgeiwerke) issued by the publisher in 1966 (rev. ed., 1977). In turn, this publication took the place of yet an earlier Breitkopf & Hartel edition prepared by the eminent and prolific musicologist Max Seiffert, who in 1906 was the first to edit Walther's collected works for organ as part of Denkmaler deutscher Tonkunst (ser. 1, vols. 26-27). The opportunity after World War II for Breitkopf & Hartel (relocated from Leipzig to Wiesbaden) to reissue its older editions in photographic reprints prompted an equally famous scholar of the next generation, Hans Joachim Moser, to edit and critically revise Seiffert's work in 1958 (jointly published with the Akademisehe Druck- u. Verlagsanstalt in Graz). In fact, Moser had very little work to do, and in his brief introduction to the reissued edition, rightly praises the quality of Seiffert's work--arguably one of his best projects. Seiffert's work also formed the basis for the practical editions of Walther's organ chorales by Hermann Poppen (Orgelchordle: Auswahl fur den gottesdienstlichen Gebrauch [Kassel: Barenreiter, 1930; 2d ed., 1935; 4th ed., 1956]). Although Moser's second critica l commentary offers corrections for only six unimportant misprints, at $25 (the price I paid in the late 1950s), it was an excellent value for a 864-page double volume. By comparison, this amount today would not even buy one volume of the new edition. Beckmann's division of Walther's works is logical: the first volume contains the free works, preludes (and one toccata) and fugues (and the like), a set of variations on a basso continuo by Arcangelo Corelli, and one original concerto, together with fourteen of Walther's arrangements of concertos by others; the chorale settings are divided alphabetically over the remaining three volumes. There are two different German introductions with acceptable English translations, one for the free works and arrangements and a second repeated in each of the chorale volumes. The separate critical commentaries for each volume, in German only, include, in addition to remarks on editorial practice and ornamentation, a full description of printed and manuscript sources. They are a pleasure to use compared with Seiffert's. No doubt the luxury of full translations of the complete commentary would have added to the size and cost of the volumes; in any event, most performers curious to retrace Beckmann's editorial footsteps proba bly have some ability in reading German. Nevertheless, if this edition should achieve a well-earned reissue, Breitkopf & Hartel might consider an English translation of at least the sections on editorial practice or, failing that, the section on ornamentation. Walther's chorales especially abound in ornaments of all kinds, and Beckmann provides much important information about performing them that should be easily available to all organists playing from these scores. …

Rigidity and fuzziness within the framework of English Statutes and Law Reports. Original French title: Rigidité et Fluidité dans les cadres Législatif et jurisprudentiel anglais

Rigidity and fuzziness within the framework of English Statutes and Law Reports. Original French title: Rigidité et Fluidité dans les cadres Législatif et jurisprudentiel anglais