ABSTRACT In intersemiotic translations, we may speak of a “hypertextuality” among different discourses that raise questions regarding “translatability” and foreground the multifaceted transcultural connection between the source texts and target texts, which is affected by the translator’s intercultural competence. Such intercultural competence can be observed in Okan Bayülgen’s Richard, a translation and appropriation of Shakespeare’s Richard III. Presenting and deconstructing ideas on medieval thoughts on the body, current debates on social and personal trauma, racism, ethics, and the function of theatre, Bayülgen does not merely translate Shakespeare’s Richard III into Turkish but translates it to twenty-first-century socio-political topics like the migration crisis and the elusiveness of defining what is evil in today’s post-truth period from a Turkish intellectual point-of-view. Thus, this essay aims to examine intersemiotic translations, the intersections of translation and critical race theory, and narrative equivalence to illustrate how Bayülgen’s Richard as an intersemiotic translation and appropriation recontextualises Shakespeare’s historically and culturally distant Richard III and makes it accessible to twenty-first-century Turkish audiences.

Introduction. Based upon seven American and English contemporary novels translated into Russian the paper deals with semantic deviations from the original deliberately inserted into the target text with the aim to distort its content. These translation strategy’s distinctive peculiarities revealed by the authors testify to their nonrandom typical regularity which makes their detailed analysis and classification increasingly urgent. The primary objectives of the research: to put forward a justified classification of the factual material proceeding from the specific type of the given content’s distortion; to suggest the authors’ own versions of translation that could have been used in rendering the original’s content. The research methodology: the random sample of the relevant factual material; the comparative analysis of parallel meaningful excerpts from the original and its translation; the contextual and interpretative method; the method of translational experiment i.e. the authors’ own translations of the analyzed textual units. Results. Taking into account the fact that the related theoretical literature lacks any substantiation of such intentional distortions, the authors have tried to take a completely new approach both to analyzing and systematizing the factual material proceeding from the concrete means resulting in the original’s distortion of the sort. The bulk of examples has been classified into six groups: complete and utter change of the original’s content; insertion of superfluous content to the target text; insertion of outdated clichés to the target text; insertion of widely known citations to the target text; deliberate and glaring omission of the original’s content in translation; the original’s pragmatic distortion by way of ‘‘correcting’’ seemingly drastic factual mistakes. Conclusion. The results obtained may prove helpful and useful both for translators of fiction and higher-school lecturers of the theory and practice of translation as well as a number of related linguistic disciplines.

Abstract This study investigates the effect of structural priming on dative alternation in Italian-to-Dutch translation. We analyse variation between the double object construction (DOC) and the prepositional object construction (POC) to determine whether the dative structure in the Italian source text influences the Dutch target text, while controlling for key language-internal factors. The methodology is corpus-based and applies a generalized linear mixed-effects model to a richly annotated dataset of translated sentence pairs ( N = 719). Results show that the Italian construction significantly predicts the Dutch target construction, along with several conditioning variables: animacy of the recipient, length difference between theme and recipient, definiteness of the recipient, and the specific verb involved. These findings align with previous corpus-based studies on structural priming in translation ( De Sutter et al ., 2021 , 2023 ), contribute to the Shared Representation Model ( Schaeffer and Carl, 2013 ), and support the relevance of corpus-based approaches in structural priming research in translation.

This study examines Wir sind doch nicht vom Mond by Ruth Herrmann and Hamburgdaki Küçük İstanbul by Ruth Hermann and Zeyyat Selimoğlu as a translational product from a multidimensional perspective based on the social semiotics. It also critically engages with how differential voices of numerous agents, including author, photographer, translator, and child protagonists, conceptualized as translatorial voice, are reflected along the multilayered transfer processes in the texts in a contrastive manner. Defining translation as not only a linguistic activity but also a multidimensional practice with the insights from the social semiotics, this study focuses on the translational features characterizing the narratives in both languages. The multidimensional stance provides a holistic perspective into the transfer processes shaping the narratives in their host and receiving context. It is thus argued that the deconstruction of the source and target texts as traditionally conceived entities contributes to explore distinct transfer processes at work in the redesignation of the texts, which constitutes translational chains beyond their immediate environments. It is also discussed that the concept of voice(s) might be broadened to discuss the plurality of the voices of fictional and non-fictional agents explicitly or implicitly shaping the narrative, thereby translating agents and their translatorial voices emerges as distinct and subject positions to be explored.

• Semantic-aware diffusion: edits guided by image-text discrepancy for precise, controllable changes. • Fast and lightweight: 50-iteration fine-tune with LoRA ( 0.37% params), 17 s per image. • Better alignment without sacrificing fidelity: higher CLIP on TEdBench with competitive LPIPS. • Broadly applicable: runs on SD v1.4 and ports to SDXL (via IP-Adapter) with consistent gains. Text-guided single-image editing has emerged as a promising solution to precisely alter an input image based on the target texts, such as making a standing dog appear seated or a bird spreading its wings. While effective, conventional approaches require a two-step process, including fine-tuning the target text embedding for over 1K iterations and the generative model for another 1.5K iterations. Although it ensures that the resulting image closely aligns with both the input image and the target text, this process often requires 7 minutes per image, posing a challenge for practical application due to its time-intensive nature. To address this bottleneck, we introduce FastEdit, a fast text-guided single-image editing method with semantic-aware diffusion fine-tuning, accelerating the editing process to just 17 seconds. FastEdit streamlines the generative model’s fine-tuning phase, reducing it from 1.5K to 50 iterations. Specifically, we perform diffusion fine-tuning on certain time steps determined by the semantic discrepancy between the input image and target text. We conduct extensive experiments to validate the editing performance of our approach and show promising editing capabilities, including content addition, style transfer, background replacement, and posture manipulation, etc. Our code and more edited images are available at https://fastedit-sd.github.io .

This study examines the application of Baker’s (2011) translation strategies in the English–Arabic translation of Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea. The analysed document is Ba'labki's (1992) translation of Hemingway's novel The Old Man and the Sea. By adopting a qualitative method, the research analyses selected segments from the source text and their Arabic translation to investigate how specific translation strategies are employed to convey meaning accurately and effectively. The analysis is conducted at the sentence and paragraph levels, allowing for a detailed comparison between the source text and the target text. The study focuses on eight strategies proposed by Baker: translation by a more general word, translation by a less expressive or neutral word, cultural substitution, loan word plus explanation, paraphrase using related words, paraphrase using unrelated words, omission, and illustration. The findings reveal that these strategies play a crucial role in addressing lexical, cultural, and stylistic challenges encountered in literary translation. The translator’s choices demonstrate a balance between preserving the original meaning and adapting it to suit the linguistic and cultural expectations of the Arabic readership. Overall, the study highlights the effectiveness of Baker’s strategies in enhancing clarity, readability, and communicative impact in novel translation, underscoring their significance in English–Arabic literary translation.

Abstract This study examines the role of term consistency and text continuity in specialized translation, as well as the challenges translators face in maintaining them. It defines and illustrates terminological chains, highlighting the difficulty of balancing term consistency and text continuity across languages. Using examples from the German-Italian language pair, the paper argues that maintaining referential continuity in the target text requires recognizing terminological chains, comparing conceptual structures across languages, and applying appropriate translation strategies. Since standard terminology alone may not always suffice, various strategies can help preserve terminological chains, particularly when languages differ in how they form clusters. However, some of these strategies may conflict with existing translation quality evaluation standards, raising the question of whether transferring terminological chains should be a quality criterion. The need to preserve these chains in the target text and their impact on translation evaluation will also be assessed.

This study contextualises translation as intercultural political textual communication and relations within the Post colony that takes place at the intersection of culture, meaning and language. The Postcolony is a politically active space in which former coloniser and formerly colonised cultures negotiate their differentiated meanings, identities and humanities in asymmetrical relations using various communicative media – textual, oral and symbolic. Translation is both textual and symbolic communication mediated through translator-manipulable language and embossed with the potency of cultural knowledge, meaning and identity representations; translation can create understanding or exacerbate conflict. This calls for differentiated understanding of the workings of culture, meaning and language in the translation politics of the Postcolony. This study was designed on an interpretive qualitative research and deployed postcolonial translation theory to account for inequality and contestation of knowledge and meanings in textual cultural encounters and to interrogate neocolonial forms of representation. The study heuristically reviews the bondedness of culture, meaning and language in postcolonial translation communication that interfaces the politics of cultural identity representation. Purposively selected translation text units are used to illustrate the underlayered texture of a dialogic discourse in a postcolonial translation communication that insists on retaining and legitimising in the target text remnants of the negative ‘otherness’ inscribed on an African culture in primordial European narratives of negation on Africa(ns).The study concludes on the critical positioning of the translator in the culture–meaning–language nexus to mediate unbiased textual representation of cultural realities and identities in international cultural political communication; thus contributing to intercultural understanding and, potentially, to intercultural cooperation.

Text-based automatic compliance checking (ACC) employs natural language processing technologies to scrutinize a corporation’s business documents, ensuring adherence to related normative texts. The current methods fall into two primary categories: symbol-based and embedding-based approaches. Symbol-based methods, noted for their accuracy and transparent processing, suffer from limited versatility. Conversely, embedding-based methods operate independently of expert knowledge yet often yield challenging-to-interpret results and require substantial volumes of annotated data. While both types of methods exhibit advantages in different aspects, the current research fails to combine these advantages effectively. Therefore, the existing methods fail to balance interpretability, generalization ability, and accuracy, which are key requirements for practical compliance systems. To address this problem, we introduce a novel approach termed the Dynamic Prompt-based Logic-Aided Compliance Checker (DPLACC), which is grounded in the prompt learning framework. This method initially parses target texts, transforming the results into first-order logical expressions. It subsequently retrieves pertinent knowledge from a knowledge graph, converting the knowledge into analogous first-order logical expressions. These expressions are then encoded into a global semantic vector via a pre-trained first-order logistic encoder. Ultimately, the semantics of expressions and initial texts are amalgamated within the prompt template, facilitating the logical knowledge enhancement of model reasoning. Experiments on Chinese and English datasets demonstrate that DPLACC comprehensively outperforms existing methods based solely on symbols or embeddings in terms of accuracy, precision, recall, and F1 score and significantly surpasses current mainstream large language models. Furthermore, DPLACC exhibits enhanced interpretability and reduced data dependence, maintaining 70% checking accuracy with as few as ten training samples. This capability allows DPLACC to be rapidly deployed in data-scarce real-world scenarios with minimal annotation overhead, thus offering a practical pathway toward the scalable implementation of compliance inspection systems.

Filmic adaptation of literary texts is usually likened to translation. This simile partly follows from the fact that, in translation – the same as in adaptation context –, the consumers of the target text differ from the public targeted by the source text. Indeed, in the same way the source and the target texts are destined to two linguistically different sets of receivers in translation, the filmic adaptation and its literary source are aimed at two different sets of consumers. The latter is destined to readers while the former is targeted at tele-viewers or cinema goers. Additionally, while the literary/source text seeks to tell, the filmic/target text aims at showing. The aforementioned truism therefore warrants that any plausible film adaptations conform mainly to the principles of cinematographic and audio-visual productions. In other words, a filmic adaptation should be more ‘visually engaging’ than ‘imagination-provoking’; this is so, given the cinema medium’s visuality and artistic function. Contrary to this theory, Biyi Bandele’s adaptation of Wole Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman – titled Elesin Oba – happens to questionably be excessively faithful to its source text and to the stage. This paper seeks to illustrate this problematic faithfulness, as well as the possible raison d’être for the cineast’s creative choices. Using a textual analysis of Elesin Oba: The King’s Horseman, critical observations and secondary sources, the paper specifically shows how Biyi Bandele’s excessive fidelity to the source dramatic text affects the quality of its adaptation and the factors that could account for, or justify such an excessive fidelity to the source text.

ABSTRACT Given the increasing integration of artificial intelligence (AI) in translation practice, assessing its impact on gender bias through a feminist lens assumes critical urgency. This study examined 87 translation cases extracted from widespread social media discussions that expressed dissatisfaction with gender bias in translation. ChatGPT-4 was utilized in four experimental tasks: pre-translation source-text scoring, translation of 87 texts, evaluation through scoring parallel texts, and separate evaluation of the source and target texts. The findings revealed that, notwithstanding the discrepancy between ChatGPT’s identification of gender bias and opinions on social media, AI demonstrated potential in attenuating gender bias by detecting bias in the translation, remaining faithful to the source texts, employing inclusive expressions, or adding notes, especially when guided by suitable prompts. Grounded in feminist translation theory, this study attempted to offer feasible suggestions for mitigating gender bias in translation in the era of AI.

Translating cultural concepts from African languages into English has been problematic over the years. Part of the problem is when there is no equivalence between cultural concepts in two languages. This article examines translation strategies that support the accurate and culturally sensitive rendering of Xitsonga cultural concepts into English, focusing on domestication and foreignisation. The researcher identified and selected culturally specific Xitsonga concepts and produced two English translations for each; one using domestication and the other foreignization. Respondents were then asked to indicate which translation they found clearer and more culturally appropriate, and to provide explanations for their choices through open-ended questions. Findings show that domestication was generally preferred, as it provided clearer explanations while minimising foreign elements in the target text. The study highlights the importance of employing suitable translation strategies to bridge cultural and linguistic gaps, demonstrating how translators can make informed decisions to convey meaning accurately while maintaining cultural fidelity. Though, it was found that domestication as a paraphrasing strategy works best in the translation of cultural concepts from Xitsonga into English, the respondents conceded that translating cultural concepts is quite a daunting task. Hence, a translator must have an in-depth knowledge of the two cultures namely: Xitsonga and English. This article broadens the scope of discourse on how the translation of cultural concepts from African languages into English can be maximally done. Translators, lexicographers and authors will benefit from the findings of the study, particularly on how to address the non-equivalence of cultural terms between two languages.

Whether it is a book or a media product, the title is the first parameter that catches the eye, attracts attention, or leads to an overlook due to dislike. In the same sense, the translation of titles plays a pivotal role in promoting products and revealing their content by appealing to the audience. Developed by Hans Vermeer, the skopos theory is a functionalist theory that moves from linguistic equivalency to the functional suitability of the target text. This study analyzes the translation of TV show titles from the perspective of skopos theory, focusing on how commercial imperatives influence the translation choices in the title translation process. A corpus of 50 English-language TV show titles and their officially recognized Turkish translations was gathered from two mainstream television channels (TLC and DMAX) in Turkiye. Each title was analyzed to identify its primary translation aim and categorized according to Reiss’s functional text types model, aligning with the overarching skopos theory. Then, an in-depth clarification of Vermeer’s skopos theory is put forward. In the following section, the TV show titles are handled in Newmark’s (1988) framework for translation methods. The study’s findings demonstrate a tendency to translate English titles that are more target culture-oriented and incorporate local language characteristics rather than to provide a conservative, direct translation. The reasons for these specific choices can be attributed to the commercial value of the TV shows, which is influenced by audience demand and cultural context, as the main aim of the title translation is to make the show appeal to the target audience. Overall, the results reveal that the translation of TV show titles, in terms of the translation methods applied, is directly affected by the translation task’s skopos.

There are diverse strategies for addressing the lexical-semantic problems in translation. Yet, no studies have scrutinised the strategies for dealing with the lexical-semantic problem in cross-cultural translation. This paper considered the strategies employed to overcome the lexical semantic problem in the context of informative translation among the Luo and Luugoli communities in the conflcuence areas in Kenya. Thus, the paper considered the lexical-semantic challenges encountered in cross-cultural translation, focusing on the complex issues that arise when transferring meaning across languages with different semantic orientations and cultural backgrounds. For instance, polysemy, homonymy, synonymy, idioms, metaphors, and culture-specific concepts tend to be problematic for translators. In this regard, crosscultural stranslation adds a significant layer to the already complex lexical-semantic problem. Hence, interrogating the practical strategies for resolving the lexical-semantic ambiguities during translation while preserving the semantic equivalence between source and target texts is deemed acutely essential. This is done in light of the understanding that language and culture are so closely intertwined yet markedly different, and that language is usually seen as a verbal expression of culture. Based on the analysis of literature, the lexical-semantic changes experienced during translation have been suggested. It is argued that borrowed items present lexical-semantic problems during translation. As a result, translation strategies are required to resolve the lexical semantic problems during translation to enhance cross-cultural communication

The present study focuses on translating Arab animal-related terms into English using ChatGPT (CGPT). The main objectives of the study are to investigate the extent to which the intended meaning of Arabic animal idioms (AAIs) is preserved in texts translated into English through CGPT, as well as to determine the extent to which the chosen translation program applies Larson's theory when translating selected samples, which consist of 10 Arabic animal idioms and their translations into English. A qualitative, descriptive research approach was employed to collect and analyse the selected data, aiming to achieve the study's objectives. This approach is based on using Larson's strategy to examine the data chosen for the translator's translation (CGPT) from the source text to the target text, analyse it, and determine its accuracy, naturalness, and clarity, given that researchers have not studied the translation of Arabic animal idioms into English using CGPT. The results of this study generally showed differences in the meaning of the original idioms during the translation process, in terms of accuracy, clarity, and naturalness, due to some additions and subtractions that affected the meaning of the original text in the translated text. The likely reason is the unavailability or lack of recognition of these idioms by the selected translator, which leads to misunderstandings and failure to achieve the intended purpose of translating these important idioms during the translation process.

The translation of advertising texts is a multifaceted process that transcends simple linguistic substitution, requiring a deep integration of semiotics, cultural studies, and marketing psychology. This article explores the specific translation transformations employed when rendering English advertising content into the Uzbek language. Given the structural divergence between English (an analytic language) and Uzbek (an agglutinative language), as well as the profound cultural differences between Western and Central Asian consumer markets, literal translation often fails to preserve the persuasive impact of the original message. Through a qualitative and comparative analysis of various global and local brand campaigns, this study identifies and categorizes the most effective transformation strategies, including transposition, modulation, adaptation, and transcreation. The findings suggest that successful advertising translation in the English-Uzbek pair is primarily governed by functional and pragmatic equivalence, where the target text is reconstructed to evoke a specific emotional response in the Uzbek-speaking audience.

Legal translation serves as a means of cross-cultural communication and plays an indispensable role in the interaction and integration of different legal systems. With the continuous elevation of China's opening-up level, the demand for mutu-al translation between Chinese and English legal texts has been expanding. Con-sequently, a series of issues regarding the accuracy, uniformity and standardiza-tion of legal terminology translation have gradually become a focal point of com-mon concern. Eugene Nida's Functional Equivalence Theory emphasizes that a target text should achieve equivalent effect with the source text in terms of in-formative function and communicative effect, rather than merely clinging to me-chanical correspondence in linguistic forms. This theory provides an important approach to addressing problems such as legal system differences and cultural default in legal translation. However, legal texts possess mandatory binding force and high authority, which requires legal terminology translation to be not only conceptually precise but also formally standardized in expression. In practical translation, these two requirements are often difficult to be balanced simultane-ously, leading to frequent trade-offs. Based on the Functional Equivalence Theory and combined with typical examples of Chinese and English legal terms, this paper analyzes the specific manifestations and underlying causes of the imbalance be-tween accuracy and authority, and finally proposes balancing methods that can take both into account. It aims to provide more practical references for legal translation practice and facilitate more standardized, efficient and precise cross-border legal communication.

Positioning is influenced by social and political contexts and constructs them in return. In political discourse, positioning refers to the construction of identity and power relations, and the shifts of positioning could cause shifts in power and identities. In order to analyse the variations of positioning in diplomatic translation, this study chooses press conferences held by China’s Foreign Ministry and focuses on the responses and translation to the questions about COVID-19. It adopts Appraisal Theory together with framing strategies to check how appraisal resources are translated and how they affect the variations of positioning in the target text. By applying the Critical Discourse Analysis approach, the study finds that most subcategories of appraisal resources decreased in the target text. Different framing strategies were used with different distributions in each subcategory. These framing strategies repositioned the spokespersons and different participants involved in the press conferences and thus resulted in different diplomatic effects in the target text, which includes a more modest image of China, a clearer image of negative others, as well as an increase in the spokespersons’ power.

The article examines English metaphorical nominal quantifiers and the peculiarities of their translation into Ukrainian, in terms of the role of these lexemes in expressing indefinite quantity and conveying expressive-evaluative meaning. The research highlights collocational constraints and semantic shifts in ‘Noun of Noun’ constructions. A comparative analysis of English originals and Ukrainian translations reveals translation methods employed while rendering them, as well as grammatical divergences that can occur in the target text.

Abstract This study examines referential explicitation in Large Language Models (LLMs)-based machine translation (MT) compared to neural machine translation (NMT) and human translations. Referential explicitation—the process of making implicit referential expressions explicit in the target text, has been recognized as a crucial aspect of translation studies. Through Multidimensional Analysis (MDA), findings indicate that all translation modes perform referential explicitation across various genres including news, academic, and fiction. The degree of explicitation in LLM-based machine translation falls between human translations and neural machine translations. Moreover, machine translations prioritize clarity and transparency, whereas human translations tend to preserve implicit references especially in fiction. This difference underscores the challenge for neural machine translations in balancing clarity with cultural nuances. Notably, LLM-based machine translations demonstrate improvements, achieving performance closer to human translators due to their distinct underlying logic compared to neural machine translation. Additionally, genre-specific patterns reveal consistently high levels of explicitation in news and academic texts, while fiction translations vary in their preservation of implicit references. This study enhances the theoretical understanding of translation universals and contributes to the development of advanced evaluation metrics for machine translation.