Translation Problems Research Articles

Overlapping Sociolinguistic Underpinnings with Semantic Aspects of Cross-cultural Communication in African Drama Texts Translation

Analyzing semantic aspects of cross-cultural communication in drama texts translation within the African socio-cultural perspective constitutes a major challenge in the field of sociolinguistics, especially in this era of globalization influenced by aided technology, linguistic diffusion, and socio-cultural identity adulteration. Within this perspective, it is obliging for translation problems to constitute the core of communication across cultures, especially African cultures that are still considered rudimentary. The fact that many African languages do not exist in written forms constitutes a limitation to the effective transference of mother tongue socio-cultural linguistic nuances to learned official languages entangled with sociocultural context meanings of actions, thoughts and feelings as lived and experienced within the immediate or larger linguistic community. Present trends on effective drama text translation – (delocalization, polarization between performability and readability) are in favor of reviewing social structures as meaning oriented, while observed behavior is now equally being recognized as a manifestation of a deeper set of codes and rules. From this, the task of the translator is seen more as that of unraveling contextually appropriate communication within cultural frames than just a lexicosemantic restitution of texts. This study sets out to examine the convergent stances in sociology and linguistics and to postulate that the language used in a social context raises serious questions about language and communication in heterogeneous speech communities. The paper further argues that analyzing semantic aspects of cross-cultural communication in drama texts translation within the African socio-cultural perspective constitutes a major challenge in communicating across cultures since translators must sort to establish the highest possible degree of semantic agreement and intelligibility. The paper rabes up with the justification as to why sociolinguistic analysis should have precedence over semantics, for not only what is said is central to translation but how, to whom, in what manner and under what particular social circumstances must be seen as semantic markers.

Validation of intercultural sensitivity and respect for diversity scale (RDS) in a Korean sample

ABSTRACT Intercultural sensitivity is the affective dimension of intercultural competence. Recently, the Intercultural Sensitivity Scale (ISS) was validated for Korean samples, which raised conceptual, translational, and metrological problems. This study improved on the previous ISS Korean version, developed the Respect for Diversity Scale (RDS), and reanalysed the results according to gender and school level. The sample comprised 542 native Korean-speaking high school and college students. Both scales confirmed the validity of 12 items across four dimensions. Notably, the mean ISS scores exceeded those of the RDS across most factors. Gender differences exhibited significance in the scores of both scales, while school-level differences did not prove significant. This study contributes to the literature that has adapted and validated the ISS with participants from non-English-speaking cultures. Additionally, it sheds light on the relationship between the ISS and measures of general diversity appreciation, highlighting variations based on participants’ background characteristics.

Comparative Analysis of Pix2Pix and CycleGAN for Image-to-Image Translation

Image-to-Image translation technology is nowadays a prevailing research orientation in computer-vision domain, which aims to translate the styles and features in images from one image domain to another. With the rapid development of the convolutional neural networks, especially generative adversarial network technology, breakthroughs have been made in the performance of image translation, which has been widely used in many fields such as labeling photos to synthesize photos, reconstructing objects from line drawings, and coloring pictures. The Image-to-Image Translation problem is essentially a pixel-to-pixel mapping. Limited by specific task settings, the performance of different general frameworks often fluctuates greatly when dealing with different translation tasks. In this paper, focusing on the above problems, the advanced and commonly used Image-to-Image Translation frameworks such as Pix2Pix and CycleGAN, are selected to compare and analyze the advantages in detail from different dimensions including network structure, loss function, applications and model accuracy. Furthermore, for different practical application scenarios, we discuss solutions based on these two representative frameworks and show the results after image translation processing. Finally, the existing problems and future research directions are discussed and summarized.

Tulevaisuuden kääntäjän kuva

Commercial specialized translation is a rapidly evolving industry most prominently characterised by pressure towards lower prices and the implementation of new technological tools. Based on interviews of translation professionals, I describe how they expect the industry to develop: which positive and negative trends they recognize, which competence profiles translators will need, and how the implementation of machine translation tools and features will change their work. It is evident that while translation professionals are worried about the negative price development and have somewhat mixed feelings about machine translation, they believe that human translators will continue to be needed for the foreseeable future. Anticipated changes in competence profiles include increased specialization, the ability to work fast, and the ability to adopt new tools. The interviewees also expect that translators may be motivated to specialize either in post-editing of machine-translated texts, or in highly creative translations. They are well aware of the benefits and risks of machine translation; while recognizing the considerable improvement in machine translation technology, they do not believe that the typical quality problems of neural machine translation can be fully resolved.

AN ANALYSIS OF THE PROBLEMS OF ABSTRACT TRANSLATION IN CHINESE ACADEMIC JOURNALS

The abstract is an indispensable component of an academic paper. The English version of the abstract in Chinese academic journals plays an important role in its international influence. However, as the English editor of a Chinese academic journal, the author noted mistakes and problems in the English translation of the abstracts ranging from diction and grammar to logic and structure. Based on the classification of the typical mistakes and the exploration of the root causes of them, this paper offers a feasible solution to the above problems in the hope of offering reference for the writing and translation of abstracts in academic journals.

Exploring the Process and Strategies of Chinese–English Abstract Writing Using Machine Translation Tools

The present study explores English as a foreign language (EFL) learners’ processes and strategies when using machine translation (MT) tools in academic abstract writing. Eight EFL graduate students were introduced to translation-friendly writing strategies using Google Translate and were required to produce an English abstract with the aid of a machine translation tool. The study used qualitative and quantitative approaches in data collection and analysis. A triangulation process was developed and implemented, including think-aloud protocols during the writing session, surveys, and individual interviews after the writing session. The findings suggested that the translation-friendly writing strategies introduced to the participants were useful in enhancing the quality of their writing. Each participant demonstrated individual strategic uses of MT. Among the various strategies reported, back translation was the most commonly adopted one; that is, they first composed an abstract in Chinese (L1) and engaged in multiple rounds of translation between Chinese and English using MT; when problems were identified in the English abstract, they modified the Chinese abstract using translation-friendly writing strategies to enhance the quality of MT translation output. Most of the translation problems identified by the participants were related to non-academic expressions. While participants were satisfied with the quality of the abstracts produced with the aid of MT, they raised ethical concerns regarding the use of MT in academic writing. These findings suggest that MT has fundamentally changed the process of academic writing in English and call for the re-examination of the purpose of academic writing instruction and the approaches employed.

The Mistranslation of 1 Corinthians 11.26 in Vietnamese

This paper is concerned with the mistranslation of the Greek word καταγγέλλετε katangellete “you proclaim” in 1 Cor 11.26 in the first major Protestant translation of the Bible into Vietnamese, a problem that has continued to be reproduced in subsequent translations. The paper identifies the problem and discusses the importance of context in distinguishing the Greek second-person plural present active indicative and imperative forms. A solution to this historical translation problem is also suggested, involving the use of a particle indicating progressive aspect.

PROBLEMS OF TRANSLATING SYNONYMS AND HOMONYMS IN THE HOLY QURAN: A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF TWO QURANIC TRANSLATIONS BY YUSUF ALI AND AHMED ALI

The semantic phenomena of synonymy and homonymy are considered a problem in translation since the translators have to choose between more than one equivalents taking into consideration the exact nuances in meaning. Regarding the translation of the Holy Quran, synonymy and homonymy also remains a controversial issue among Arab scholars who did not agree about the existence of these two semantic phenomena in the Holy Quran, therefore, translators most of the time fail in translating synonyms and homonyms in The Holy Quran. This study focused on the problems that faced the two translators Yusuf Ali and Ahmed Ali during their translations of some synonymous and homonymous words in The Holy Quran. The main problem was that the two translators depended on the literal translation method to translate synonymous and homonymous words in many cases. The second problem that this study focused on that the two translators ignored the similarity in pronunciation between Arabic language and English language. It focused on one of the main reasons behind these difficulties, which is the translator's ignorance of the exegeses of The Holy Quran.

Towards Epistemic Translatability: On Epistemic Difference and Hermeneutical Injustice

ABSTRACT This paper addresses the relationship between epistemic difference and hermeneutical injustice, starting from an example discussed by Townsend and Townsend: the case of the Kichwa Indigenous People of Sarayaku v. Ecuador before the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. My thesis is that translation is inevitably at work in communicative exchanges involving epistemic difference, and that considering the problem of translation allows us to refine our understanding of epistemic injustice and mobilise further resources to respond to it. In a first step, I will discuss McGlynn’s critique of Townsend and Townsend’s approach, and in particular the notion of discursive injustice elaborated by Kukla. Drawing on the notion of symbolic institution as theorised by the Belgian phenomenologist Marc Richir, I will show how translation is at work in this case, seeking to pinpoint the hermeneutical injustice at play. In a second step, I will reflect on the different paradigms of translation and argue for a broad, processual and layered conception of it. Building on Antonio Gramsci’s concept of translatability of languages, I will introduce the notion of epistemic translatability as that which allows translational strategies to be devised across epistemic difference in order to counter hermeneutical injustice.

ANALYSIS OF NASSAR’S ARABIC TRANSLATION OF FRENCH CULTURE-SPECIFIC ITEMS IN HEMINGWAY'S NOVEL "THE SUN ALSO RISES"

Translating the cultural aspects of any source language is not easy. Translation problems may vary depending on both the cultural and linguistic gap between the two concerned languages. This study examines the translation of French Culture Specific Items henceforth (FCSIs) into Arabic. It aims to identify the strategies used by the Arabic translator Sameer Ezzat Nassar (2015) in transferring the meaning of the FCSIs in Hemingway's novel "The Sun Also Rises" (1926). This descriptive corpus-based research analyzes the Arabic translation of the FCSIs to examine the strategies followed in translating them. The study has found that conservation strategies (SL-oriented strategies) and substitution strategies (TL-oriented strategies) were used in translation of the FCSIs in the novel. The naturalization strategy was the most frequently followed in Nassar’s translation. This indicates a tendency to create the TL culture in the Arabic translation.

Exploiting mixing regularization for truly unsupervised font synthesis

Creating a novel font set requires domain expertise and is a laborious and time-consuming process, particularly for languages with a large number of characters and complicated structures. Existing deep learning based methods consider font generation (FG) as an image-to-image translation problem, mostly in a supervised setting, either in the form of pair images (paired data) or font labels (character or style labels), which requires extensive effort and is expensive to collect. Additionally, these supervised counter parts lack generalization for extending to other text image-related tasks, such as word image generation and font attribute control at inference time. We found that these drawbacks are mainly due to the supervised setting adopted by these existing methods for font generation. In this paper, we tackle the FG problem in a truly unsupervised fashion, where a complete font set can be generated by training the generator such that adjacent styles are not correlated and projecting the input glyph image into its corresponding font style latent space. To accomplish this, we propose the Font Mixing Generative Adversarial Network (FM-GAN), which employs mixing regularization to supervise the generator to localize the font styles, and a projection encoder to project an arbitrary glyph image into its corresponding semantic space that is compatible with the generator. In the experiments, we demonstrated that our unsupervised model synthesizes font images that are comparable to supervised state-of-the-art FG baselines. Furthermore, FM-GAN can be directly applied to other text image related tasks, such as multi-lingual font style transfer, word image generation, and font attribute control.

Problems of Translating Acts of Warning in Some Selected Political Speeches of Obama

The study aims to investigate the problems of translation in the field of speech acts especially the acts of warning in political discourse. The study sheds light on the translation of Obama`s speeches and how they implied indirectly the act of warning. The problem of this study investigates the difficulties that face the translators in translating the warning acts found in the texts. The study hypothesizes that making the translators realize the warning acts in order to achieve the goals of solving the problems in rendering the political texts. The study findings show that the student face a problem in translating the warning acts of the political texts. The study ends in a conclusion that refers to how students do not recognize that some of Obama`s selected political speeches as a kind of warning . Therefore, the students face difficulty and failure in the translation of Obama`s political speeches into Arabic.

An intelligent algorithm for fast machine translation of long English sentences

Abstract Translation of long sentences in English is a complex problem in machine translation. This work briefly introduced the basic framework of intelligent machine translation algorithm and improved the long short-term memory (LSTM)-based intelligent machine translation algorithm by introducing the long sentence segmentation module and reordering module. Simulation experiments were conducted using the public corpus and the local corpus containing self-collected linguistic data. The improved algorithm was compared with machine translation algorithms based on a recurrent neural network and LSTM. The results suggested that the LSTM-based machine translation algorithm added with the long sentence segmentation module and reordering module effectively segmented long sentences and translated long English sentences more accurately, and the translation was more grammatically correct.

Analysis of the Translation Problems of Words with Chinese Characteristics: Taking Chinese-English Translation as an Example

As a bridge and linkage of external communication, translation undertakes an important task for international communication. With the enhancement of China's soft power, the diffusion of culture has become increasingly important. That makes translation an essential stage. However, in the process of translation, many mistranslations cause the international community to misunderstand the original meaning and even misinterpret its culture. Starting from real situations and texts in Chinese to English translation, this study focuses on the problems of three phrases: “Taiwan question”, “The Communist Party of China”, and “People's democratic dictatorship” in Chinese to English translation by case analysis. As supplementary data, the researchers also conducted interviews with a Ph.D. in political science. It found that the problems may be created by the English meaning of the words, China's history and culture, and the translator's comprehension of the original language. Some suggestions for improving translation quality were also put forward from the perspectives of the country, the translation industry, and individuals.

LITERARY TRANSLATION AS A BASIS FOR DIALOGUE BETWEEN CULTURES

The new possibilities of global communication and the latest information technology bring the history of literary translation as a scientific discipline within the science of translation to a new level since it infinitely expands the possibilities of searching and comparing historically significant information necessary to build a coherent concept of the evolution of translation activity in the history of human civilization.
 The problem of translation of fiction is one of the most important in both linguistics and literary criticism. Disputes about the methods, techniques and principles of translation, about the requirements for translations and the degree of their correspondence to a target text, about the originality of a translated text, as well as the problem of interlingual communication in general do not lose relevance in modern science.
 It has been by time that for a correct and profound interpretation of a literary text, a translator must know well the information about the era described in the work and the time in which the author lived; philosophical and socio-historical prerequisites for the creation of the work to involve “out-of-text structures” [Lotman: 1970, p. 65].
 In the paper the authors explore the peculiarities of translation of literary texts, consider different points of view on this issue and draw appropriate conclusions. Also, to reveal the specifics of fiction translation, in addition to the theory of proposition, the article deals with the theory of primary and secondary genres by M. M. Bakhtin [Bakhtin: 1986].
 The authors hold the opinion that there are no good or bad translations of literary texts in general, no perfect, no canonical ones. No translation fully renders the text of the source material: each translator selects only the essentials in the original and subordinates the secondary and the tertiary to them. What they consider primary or minor is a matter of individual taste.

Whence the Womb?

Abstract In John 7:38, Jesus makes the proclamation ποταµοὶ ἐκ τῆς κοιλίας αὐτοῦ ῥεύσουσιν ὕδατος ζῶντος. Among a variety of other issues—textual problems, ambiguous syntax, and an unclear scriptural referent—an enduring problem for translators has been the word κοιλία. Here, the author argues that the most natural meaning for κοιλία in this context is “womb.” Although governed by the masculine possessive pronoun αὐτοῦ, κοιλία’s most common NT meaning is “womb,” and a survey of Greek literature corroborates “womb” as a viable translation, and preferable to the alternatives in standard Bible translations (such as “heart,” “belly,” or “side”). Reading John 7:38’s κοιλία as “womb” is supported by the immediate context and literary background and sheds further light on the Gospel’s themes of rebirth.

THE CONCEPT OF TRANSLATION METHODS AND TRANSLATION PROBLEMS OF MOVIE TRANSLATION

THE CONCEPT OF TRANSLATION METHODS AND TRANSLATION PROBLEMS OF MOVIE TRANSLATION

Students’ Strategies in Translating Humorous Text

This study aims to find out the problems that students experienced and strategies that students used in translating humorous text. The writer conducted this study using the theory of translation problems and strategies by Baker (2018). This writer conducted this study using a qualitative approach in which she collected and analyzed the data herself. The findings of this study support Baker’s (2018) statement that some of the problems that may appear during translation process are culture-specific concept, the source language concept is not lexicalized in the target language, the source and target language make different distinction in meaning, the target language lacks a specific term (hyponym), differences in expressive meaning, and differences in frequency and purpose of using specific forms. In addition, Text in the source language is translated in several different strategies namely translation by more general word, translation by more neutral or less expressive word, translation by paraphrase using related words, translation by paraphrase using unrelated words, translation using a loan word or loan word plus explanation, and translation by omission. More studies involving other types of humor and other translation theories are recommended to create variations in this field.

The hybridity of Indies culture in Indonesian novel translation into French

Postcolonial novels incorporating hybrid culture elements into the story present new problems for translation. The hybrid elements that appear in the source text can be maintained or removed in the translation process, depending on the strategy adopted by the translator. This research focus on the hybrid elements of an Indonesian postcolonial novel and the strategy for maintaining and eliminating hybridity in its French translation. The data source in this research is the novel Bumi Manusia (1980) by Pramoedya Ananta Toer as the source text and its translation in French. Using a qualitative approach with a comparative method, the analysis results show that most of the efforts to maintain hybridity are carried out in translating social life terms and self-names because they are related to the frequency of occurrence, the complexity of meaning, and identity. However, on the whole, the translation is less hybrid as more dehybridization occurs. Moreover, hybridity in Bumi Manusia and its French translation, Le Monde des hommes, is manifested differently. Although the translation tends to create a homologous space of one culture, it still shows linguistic and cultural hybridity.

Computationally efficient deep learning-based image reconstruction for sound speed estimation in ultrasound computed tomography

Ultrasound computed tomography (USCT) has great potential for breast cancer imaging due to its ability to quantify acoustic tissue properties such as the speed of sound (SOS). Full-waveform inversion (FWI)-based image reconstruction methods can produce high spatial resolution SOS images, but these methods are computationally demanding, especially when formulated in the time-domain. Deep learning (DL)-based methods can be computationally efficient and provide high-quality object estimates as studied in various medical image reconstruction problems. However, there remains a further need to develop and assess the DL-based image reconstruction methods for USCT for use in medical imaging applications. Here, we present a supervised DL approach for USCT image reconstruction that is formulated as an image-to-image translation problem. Specifically, a low-resolution SOS image obtained via traveltime tomography and a high-resolution reflection tomography image are used as inputs to a U-Net, which is trained to estimate a high-resolution SOS map. These input images are complementary, providing both quantitative information about SOS values and information about tissue boundaries. Numerical studies that employ realistic numerical breast phantoms demonstrated that the proposed method produced high-quality SOS estimates based on image quality metrics such as NMSE, SSIM, and PSNR.