Institutional Translation Research Articles

The image of the Chinese government in the English translations of Report on the Work of the Government: a corpus-based study

ABSTRACT Drawing on a corpus-based methodology and Fairclough’s approach to critical discourse analysis, this article examines the image of the Chinese government constructed in the English translations of Report on the Work of the Government released by the Chinese government from 2000 to 2021. The analysis reveals that the Chinese government is shaped as enterprising and industrious, but having a large power distance from the general public, which is evidenced by the discursive use of high-frequency content words, associated with high-frequency collocations with “we”. It is also constructed as one that is equable, resolute and sensible by the frequent use of median-value modal verbs in the English translations of Report on the Work of the Government. This article ultimately argues that the English translations of Report on the Work of the Government are impacted by the translators’ role as institutional translators and the norms of translating Chinese political texts.

The constraints in the field of institutional translation in Turkey

Abstract This paper aims to examine the constraints in the institutional field within the framework of the sociology of translation. In the paper, the term “constraint” refers to the problems that cannot be solved due to many factors and negatively affect the translation process, translators, and therefore translation product. The paper will reveal all the constraints with an analysis of the position of the field within the field of power, the structure of the field, and the habitus of agents (here exclusively referring to translators), based on Pierre Bourdieu’s model of field analysis. The study draws on the case studies of four institutions to analyze all the dynamics of the institutional field and their impact on the translation process and translation product. The institutions are the European Union Translation Coordination Presidency (EUTCP) and the Prime Ministry Directorate General of Press and Information (PDGPI) as a national institution, the United Nations World Food Program (WFP) as an international institution, and the Association of Solidarity with Asylum Seekers and Immigrants (ASAM) as a non-governmental organization. Face-to-face interviews with these four institutions, which carry out different translation activities for different purposes, will reveal the big picture of the field. However, more empirical work is needed to generalize about the constraints of this field.

Book Review. A New Contribution to the Treasury of Translation Theory

Book Review. A New Contribution to the Treasury of Translation Theory

Book translation policy of China Foreign Languages Bureau from 1949 to 1999: a historical and bibliometric perspective

ABSTRACT Governments not only develop translation policies in the ‘strict domain of public and political affairs’, but also ‘implement legal rules for the importation and export of all sorts of cultural products’. This study, which looks at the book translation of the China Foreign Languages Bureau, is an exploration of the latter kind. FLB is China’s state agency of international communication established in 1949. In over seventy years, it has published translations in book form in different languages for export, with topics ranging from politics to economics, from literature to art and even natural sciences. This article makes use of González Núñez’s model of translation policy in tracing the diachronic transformation of FLB’s book translation policy as found in its translation management and translation beliefs in its first 50 years. Then, a bibliometric analysis of the actual translation practice is conducted, with a view to explicating the distribution of text types and topics over the years and its relatedness to the management and beliefs. As a study in institutional translation, this article also aims to shed light on the institutional forces that shape the production of translation.

Clinic, community, and in-between: the influence of space on real-time translation of medical expertise by frontline healthcare professionals in marginal tribal communities

Abstract In this article, we explore real-time translation work undertaken by frontline healthcare professionals as they interact with marginal tribal communities in Western India. Our 1-year ethnographic study of a healthcare organization delivering obstetric and gynaecological care to tribal communities helps us understand how obstetric counsellors translate allopathic medical expertise across epistemological boundaries to the tribal community they serve, in localized comprehensible forms. We identify four distinct mechanisms of translation work—Interpreting, Annotating, Norming, and Justifying—which differentially deploy and integrate elements of tribal vocabulary, symbols, knowledge, and imaginations of health and body with specific aspects of clinical diagnosis and prescription, making the latter meaningful and actionable in the process. Furthermore, we use configurational approach—Qualitative Comparative Analysis—to investigate how the type of space where the interaction between the counsellors and tribal women patients happens influences the translation work undertaken. We find that counsellors engage in spatially differentiated translation work. They predominantly use justifying and norming in clinical space (hospital); interpreting and annotating in community space (village or school); and interpreting and norming in the overlapping in-between space (outdoor patient department). Our study contributes to translation literature by showing how real-time translation is undertaken in practice, especially in a setting representing high-stakes institutional translation, and how translation work is influenced by the type of space in which interactions happen.

Strange Bird in the Breed: The Translation of the Impact Investing Concept to the Corporate Logic

In the face of the aggravating state of many grand challenges, corporations are increasingly pursuing and trialling less-conventional ideas, practices and models from fundamentally different fields to affect positive environmental and social change. While institutional scholars have explored the translation of ideas, practices, and forms in-between contexts that adhere to the same or largely compatible logics, much less is known about the translation of concepts in between mutually incompatible logics. Drawing on a 21 months long ethnographic single case study of the translation of the concept of impact investing to a European media corporation, I show that the corporate motivations for such translation gradually change from ideological to pragmatic as incompatibility tensions surface, and that internal agents morph the translated concept from a strict coupling to a decoupling with the source concept in response to these changes. My findings contribute to the literatures on institutional translation, organizational adoption of practices and ideas, and business and the natural environment.

Place Elasticity and Institutional Translation of Grand Challenges in Cross-Sector Partnerships

This work investigates the mediating role of place in how grand challenges translate from policymaking to cross-sector partnerships. By focusing on science and technology parks as tools for tackling the grand challenge of regional innovation, we investigate how place mediates the way policy travels in the institutional field and is transformed along the way, generating unexpected and unwanted consequences for the involved institutional actors. Findings highlight the central role played by place elasticity in the mobilization and transformation of a grand challenge. Specifically, place continuously reshaped its boundaries to first highlight, and then ease, policymakers’ demanding concerns about doing well (managerial concerns) by catalyzing progressive attention around doing good (ethical concerns). We highlight the important role of material-ethical bundles which may first galvanize a partnership, then push it towards failure, and ultimately towards desperate attempts of recalibration which can compromise both managerial performance and ethics. These findings allow us to discuss when and how policy makers may provide guiding or misleading directions for action, why regional governments walk a thin line between mobilizing action and injecting further complexity into a field, and how to tell if cross-sector partnerships stay on course or go adrift with respect to policy indications.

Legal and institutional translation

Legal and institutional translation

Assessing legal terminological variation in institutional translation

Abstract This paper presents the main findings of a study on the translation of national court names in United Nations texts as an illustrative group of culture-bound terms. It focuses on documents produced as part of several mandatory compliance monitoring procedures in the field of human rights. The study is part of a broader project on legal translation in international organisations (LETRINT), which considers terminological consistency and adequacy as indicators of translation quality, and examines the impact of legal asymmetry on both dimensions. To shed light on the first of these indicators, a comprehensive analysis of intertextual and intratextual variations of English-Spanish and French-Spanish translations of thirty terms was conducted. Over five thousand bi- and trilingual segments, extracted from three ad-hoc multilingual and parallel corpora, were examined. They cover the period between 2000 and 2017, and refer to six legal systems. At the intertextual level, the results corroborate that legal asymmetry has a significant impact on translation decision-making, while the assessment of intratextual variation points to a link between source text length, documental series and the degree of terminological consistency.

How happy are legal translators at their work? Further findings from a cognitive–affective enquiry

ABSTRACT The translator’s happiness at work has been gaining academic attention with new transdisciplinary stimuli from psychology and identity studies in the wake of a sociological paradigm shift and translator studies. The overarching aim of this follow-up study is to compare perceptions of happiness at work in Slovak sworn and institutional (i.e. EU) translators from a cognitive–affective standpoint. The article also strives to determine and compare the subjects’ affective feelings when translating through the IWP Affect Questionnaire. The research reveals that the majority of the legal translators show positive “happiness styles”, but there are some pronounced between-cohort differences which are discussed in detail. The prevalence of positive over negative affective feelings has been confirmed via happiness metrics. The results of the cognitive–affective research in the Slovak social space enhance the investigations into translators’ happiness at work by an analysis of their socio-psychological identities through a lens of affective translation studies.

Religion and the World Health Organization: an evolving relationship

Much has been written about WHO. Relatively little is known, however, about the organisation’s evolving relationship with health-related personal beliefs, ‘faith-based organisations’ (FBOs), religious leaders and religious communities (‘religious actors’)....

Examining institutional translation through a legal lens

Abstract Studies of institutional translation have traditionally focused on European Union (EU) institutions and legislative genres. In order to develop a more comprehensive characterization of translation at international organizations beyond EU supranational law, this study compares a full mapping of multilingual text production at EU institutions to that of two representative intergovernmental organizations (IGOs), the United Nations (UN) and the World Trade Organization (WTO), over three years (2005, 2010, and 2015) in three common official languages (English, French, and Spanish). The corpus-driven quantitative analysis and categorization of all texts from a legal-functional perspective corroborate the interconnection of a wide range of textual genres that perform, support, or derive from central law-making, monitoring, and adjudicative functions, or fulfill other administrative purposes. The findings also highlight interinstitutional variation that reflects the features of each legal order, in particular the prominence of hard law-making at the EU (with a high proportion of drafts and input documents) as opposed to larger translation volumes in monitoring procedures at the UN and the WTO. This mapping is considered instrumental to further analyze legal and other specialized translation practices in international institutional settings, and ultimately to inform translator training and translation quality management.

Freelancing, translating, observing: Association4U case study

The paper presents an overview of the freelance practice in the Ukrainian translation industry through the lens of the role of Associate Translation Fellow at “Association4U” EU-funded technical aid project (Phase I) aimed at supporting approximation of Ukrainian laws to EU legislation. To meet the challenges of the ever-changing political world, translators should be able to build specific capacities. Under the microscope of the observations made is the range of competences which a contemporary translator should have to maintain a competitive profile in institutional translation domain. An institutional translator’s portrait has been drawn up based on the A4U case, which became possible due to feedbacks given to junior fellows and stylistic analysis of the translated texts. The studies of acquis communautaire provide insights into the stylistic peculiarities of translation of the EU acts in the context of the Ukrainian language. Key attention is given to cognitive, stylistic, and discursive aspects of translation process. The paper deals with a complex of the general philological background and specific skills of translation experts, which is a pre-requisite of accurate translation in the framework of academic, industrial, and institutional realms.

Exploring the Portrayal of Institutional Translators and Interpreters in the Republic of Ireland’s English-Language Print Media

Although the Republic of Ireland has been a member of the European Union for nearly five decades, the country’s first official language, Irish, was only recognised as an official EU language on 1 January 2007. However, a lack of appropriately qualified linguistic personnel means that the language is currently subject to a derogation on its use in the EU institutions, which is scheduled to be lifted in 2022. Interviews conducted previously with interpreters in the Republic of Ireland (Hoyte-West 2020a) noted that practitioners generally viewed media coverage of the derogation as contributing to a positive image of the translational professions within the EU context; however, further research needed to be carried out on the topic. Accordingly, this article looks at how institutional translators and interpreters have been depicted in the Republic of Ireland’s English-language print media from 2007 to 2019. Using data obtained through a qualitative content analysis of the country’s three major English-language newspapers, an overview of the current situation is provided through analysis of the attitudes and opinions expressed.

Translating legal terminology and phraseology: between inter-systemic incongruity and multilingual harmonization

ABSTRACT As central aspects of legal translation practice and research, legal terminology and phraseology are a prominent area of inquiry in Legal Translation Studies (LTS). This introductory paper reviews the varying conditions and challenges of dealing with conceptual incongruity in inter-systemic legal translation, on the one hand, and the implications of ensuring harmonization and consistency in multilingual legal texts through institutional translation, on the other. These endeavors are compounded by the significant hybridity and polysemy of legal terminology, as multiple intersections co-exist between legal orders, legal fields and other specialized domains, and between legal and general language. As illustrated by this special issue, corpus-based methodologies have proven particularly fruitful approaches to investigating these issues. They support the description of terminological and phraseological features of legal genres, as well as the acceptability analysis required to make translation decisions and to elaborate lexicographical resources in line with legal and institutional translators’ needs.

Fernando Prieto Ramos (ed.). Institutional Translation for International Governance: Enhancing Quality in Multilingual Legal Communication

This article reviews Institutional Translation for International Governance: Enhancing Quality in Multilingual Legal Communication

La traducción política en China: estudio de la versión española de la obra de Xi Jinping <em>Gobernación y Administración de China</em>

El presente artículo se centra en las características de la traducción en el ámbito de la política. Clasificamos la historia de la traducción de textos políticos de la China moderna en tres etapas. La parte principal de este artículo consiste en el análisis de algunos aspectos macrológicos y micrológicos de la versión castellana de la obra de Xi Jinping Gobernación y Administración de China. En cuanto al análisis macro de este texto político, nos centramos en las características de la traducción institucional en China. En el análisis micro de la obra, nos fijamos en distintos niveles, desde la textualidad, la retórica o las estructuras oracionales hasta determinados elementos del léxico. Con una metodología indisciplinar que combina teorías políticas y traductológicas, llegaremos a conclusiones sobre las formas de la acción política, las características de las tres etapas y las estrategias utilizadas en la traducción de la obra.

Reconstructing the poet’s image through institutional translation—a case study of Rewi Alley’s translation of Li Bai’s Poems

ABSTRACT Rewi Alley was a New Zealand-born political activist, social reformer, and a renowned “foreign friend of China”, who devoted almost his entire life to China. Deeply interested in the Chinese language and culture, Alley was also a prolific translator of Chinese poetry. Although the great Chinese poet Li Bai’s poems have been translated into English by influential western translators such as Ezra Pound and Author Waley, Alley’s translation of Li Bai’s poems has some unique features in terms of text selection and translation style, which took place in an institutional setting. This study adopts an institutional approach to examine Alley’s translation of Li Bai’s poems and explores its unique features to reveal a distinctive type of institutional translation in the Chinese context. Through historical context analysis, textual analysis, and para-textual analysis of Alley’s translation, it shows that Alley in his translation has imprinted Li Bai’s poems with his own strong personal marks, reconstructing Li Bai’s image from a romantic poet into a realistic one, but failing to convey the spirit of the original poems by adopting his unconventional style of line-breaks. Alley’s translation of Li Bai’s poems was influenced by both personal and institutional ideologies and poetics, and his translation was to serve the goal of the Chinese government institution where he worked.

The use of resources for legal terminological decision-making: patterns and profile variations among institutional translators

ABSTRACT Effective information mining for legal terminological research in translation is largely determined by the ability to contextualize concepts in their legal framework and to resort to relevant legal sources. Specialized knowledge of these sources thus emerges as a competence marker that is expected to converge with that of comparative law practitioners. Against this background, a survey was conducted in order to examine institutional translators’ use of resources for translation in general and their perceptions of sources for legal translation in particular. The data provided by 234 respondents from 12 international organizations offer a comprehensive portrait of translation professionals and information-mining practices in these settings. Profile features in terms of legal translation frequency, main translation specializations and academic backgrounds were correlated to relevance and reliability scores assigned to the sources used for legal terminological research. The results confirm several hypotheses based on generally accepted indicators of specialization in this field, including the prioritization of monolingual lexicographical resources over bilingual ones and the higher reliability of primary legal sources over institutional terminological databases and previous translations. Common patterns and variations between institutions and profiles, as well as their implications for institutional terminology management and translation quality, are briefly discussed.

Institutional Translators' Field and Habitus in the Late Ottoman Period

This study focuses on the institutional translators’ field and habitus in the Ottoman Empire during the 19th century. Little research on institutional translators, particularly for those in the government institutions, has been so far carried out from a historical point of view in translation studies. Setting out to fill this gap in the literature, the present study benefits from Bourdieu’s concepts of field and habitus. It deals with the professional and political careers of seven different institutional translators who worked for the Ottoman state during the 19th century and discusses their common dispositions. Translation Chamber was established in 1821 in order to replace Greek dragomans with qualified Turkish Muslim translators to facilitate communication with leading European powers as talented diplomats. Professional and political lives of these seven historical figures display some similarities during their promotion in the imperial hierarchy. The present study argues that the Chamber functioned as a field for young students to start a bright career in the Empire. Similarly, diplomatic missions in various European capitals and the post of imperial court dragoman required the acquisition of a similar habitus that was likely to pave the way for a highly prestigious post, i.e. ministry.