Access to healthcare information for Thailand’s migrants remains a challenge throughout the COVID-19 crisis, despite the Thai government’s efforts to support this vulnerable group. This study investigates the Thai authorities’ approach of health communication for migrant workers during the COVID-19 pandemic and the role and network of translators/interpreters as the state’s agent by adopting the concepts of translation and interpreting in crisis communication and actor-network theory. This article focuses primarily on Myanmar translators/interpreters in the Thai context. The findings show that the state’s translation/interpreting efforts during the pandemic were lackadaisical in meeting such linguistic demands for migrants who have contributed significantly to Thailand’s economic growth for more than two decades. Despite the state’s adoption of a national language policy, Thai linguistic nationalism remains dominant. Such a move appears to unintentionally contain the sense of ‘foreign contamination’ brought to Thailand by these ‘inferior’ nationals but stands in stark contradiction to their trans-border language demands. Furthermore, the existing network of Thai translators/interpreters, which should assist the government in strengthening health communication for disadvantaged communities, is underdeveloped. Competing factions, non-inclusive member recruiting, and a particular priority on language pairs all thwart the network’s establishment process. The private hospitals’ translators/interpreters for Myanmar are not strongly affiliated with professional networks but with an imbalanced structure of networking.
With the rapid development of digitisation and the dominance of social streaming platforms, the way we approach pedagogy for translation has changed significantly, especially under the circumstances of COVID-19. Teaching traditionally in the classroom seems insufficient to account for today’s overall distance learning atmosphere. Combined online and offline teaching models, this paper borrows the concept of “multimodality”, developed by Kress and van Leeuwen ( 2001 , 4), to capture “when and how technologies are specialised or multi-purpose” in the application of remote teaching and learning for translation. Therefore, this article describes a teaching project which investigates the insights into three critical components inspired by non-professional subtitling and dubbing into a formal teaching context. These are a two-step pre-course preparation: a student-led questionnaire and an in-class quiz, the teamwork production of AVT works and a final post-reflection targeted at oral presentation and written review. Pedagogically, this collaborative approach enables students to improve translator competence, cultural awareness and technological capacities.
The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted people’s professional and personal life in different ways across the globe. Adopting an enlarged view of localization which goes beyond market interests and extends to public concerns, this paper aims to examine the adaptive processes through which interpreters (and by extension providers and users) have localized the COVID-19 phenomenon in Qatar. To do so, it draws on an approach which combines narrative and practice theories. Considering that practices are storied and narratives are enacted, we focus on the ‘doings’ and the ‘sayings’ of interpreters. We present the findings of a case study conducted with Qatar-based interpreters. The primary data consists of qualitative, semi-structured, face-to-face interviews with active interpreters across settings and levels of expertise in the Qatar interpreting industry. This sample allowed us to collect rich stories of interpreters’ experience at the height of the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic: between March 2020 and March 2021, coinciding in Qatar with the first lockdown and the subsequent easing of restrictions with the establishment of precautionary measures. The findings show that interpreters adapt to the COVID-19 crisis and contribute to its response in ways that are specific to the cultural, temporal and spatial configuration of practice.
This paper examines how digital users in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia responded to the COVID-19 pandemic via engaging with crisis translation by subtitling COVID-19-related videos. It explores two aspects: (1) how did social media during the pandemic encourage subtitled videos? and (2) how were these clips distributed and received by social media users? It is argued that during the pandemic, social media facilitated the production and circulation of user-generated content by both individuals and institutions to subtitle global news and other genres. To understand the socio-digital dynamics of (fan)subtitling, this article analyses the subtitled clips posted on Twitter by the Saudi Ministry of Health (MoH) and 17 fansubbers during 2020. Subtitling is considered crucial in spreading accurate information to KSA people in time for them to take precautions against the pandemic in 2020. Another relevant factor is the developed technological infrastructure in KSA and the increased digital practice of Saudi Arabians using social media. Following the analysis of 175 clips from the 17 chosen fansubbers and 255 clips from the MoH, it was discovered that social media increased the visibility of COVID-19 clips with subtitles. There was an apparent competition among the fansubbers to accumulate social capital (social media capital), which gave rise to social media fansubbing, a form of non-professional subtitling produced by social media users. The subtitled clips were accompanied by various digital parataxis that supports the analysis and examination of social media fansubbing and crisis transition on Twitter 1 .
In 2020 the first two courses on localization were introduced in Slovakia. During their preparatory stages, it was thought that they would be taught in person. Unfortunately, the COVID-19 pandemic in Slovakia had worsened by the end of the summer of 2020; teaching over both semesters was moved online and the syllabi had to be promptly adjusted to the new situation. Another change in the syllabi was required in the following academic year as teaching began in a hybrid format. The presented paper is a case study, and it will deal with the adjustments made to the courses; it will briefly introduce the first syllabi and then present the changes made after the switch to distance teaching and after the switch to hybrid teaching. The various parts of the syllabi are accompanied by statements from students that were gathered in an anonymous survey after each semester to see whether they were satisfied with the course and whether they understood the problems they had been dealing with. The results of the paper will discuss the changes, their positive and negative impact on the overall syllabi of the first two localization courses, and improvements and changes.
Abstract The main focus of the study lies on the challenges, procedures and consequences in personal and interpersonal competence development in university translation and interpreting (T&I) students during the COVID-19 pandemic. It reflects the significant change in learning conditions in Slovakia after shifting from campus-based to remote learning throughout the three waves of the pandemic, considering the personal and interpersonal competence an integral part of the curricula. The attention of the authors centres on the students’ perspective – their insight and evaluation of the applied training procedures in selected personal (self-assessment, time management, compliance with instructions and deadlines) and interpersonal (teamwork, collaborative tasks, communication with the client/assignor) skills. The year-on-year comparison of students’ responses shows improvement in training and learning strategies in almost all observed aspects of personal and interpersonal competence development and demonstrates students’ general adaptation to the changed learning environment. The findings of the research, however, raise several concerns related to students’ well-being and potential risks of mental health issues which appear to result from the overall crisis situation, social distancing, but also increased workload and work-life imbalance.
The purpose of this paper is to investigate the mutual relationship between work and family among translators and how that affects their job satisfaction and performance. More specifically, the study centres around the notions of work-family conflict ( Greenhaus, and Beutell 1985 ) and work-family facilitation ( Frone 2003 ) and analyses what effect they have on translators’ job satisfaction and performance. The study also tests the influence of the changes imposed due to the COVID-19 pandemic and the parenting role. Following Choi and Kim (2012) , a survey was conducted among a group of professional translators which contained questions on all variables under study: work-family conflict, family-work conflict, work-family facilitation, family-work facilitation, job satisfaction and job performance. The results reveal the influence of the work-family interface on job outcomes. The findings of the study have implications for professional translators and the clients they work for.
Although video game localization has lately attracted the attention of researchers, with many papers and books being devoted to this practice, it is still an underdeveloped area of Translation Studies research in Iran. The present study provides a literature review of research carried out in Iran on video game localization since 2009 to address this gap. The reviews revealed that studies on Iranian game localization fall into translational, social, cultural and political, and historical categories. The review also showed that the translational aspect is the most explored area followed by social, cultural and political, and historical aspects. The historical aspect has received the least attention in the literature, specifically in academic publications. This paper offers potential areas for future research on game localization in Iran in each aspect.
In the field of translation studies, game localisation is considered a growing branch of audiovisual translation in which localisers translate and adapt game content for successful circulation across foreign markets. This paper sheds light on the process of localising religious content and obscene references in the game Fiesta Online by comparing it to the Arabic-localised version Arafiesta on the basis of a corpus of 740 dialogue strings. Drawing on the frameworks developed by Delabastita (1989) , Zitawi (2008) and Al-Adwan (2015) , the analysis scrutinises game elements that are considered controversial in the Arab world. These items were omitted, mitigated, or adapted to isolate the theme of Paganism from the original content. Visual features were retained except for a few instances. Finally, during the process of localising interactive aspects of the game, retention, deletion and adaptation were frequently used. The paper highlights how blending game localisation, a prominent localisation approach changing the intersemiotic channels (the verbal, pictorial and interactive layers) of video games, plays a pivotal role in promoting and marketing game imports in the Arab world, which is now one of the largest growing markets.
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In late 2020, the free online translation tool Microsoft Translator began to offer the option of translating into “French (Canada)” as a target language, alongside the previously offered “French”. Using a list of ten COVID-19 terms previously identified by Bowker (2020) as having different equivalents in Canadian French and European French, we evaluate the ability of Microsoft Translator to localize these terms into the two varieties of French. The findings indicate that while this tool does a good job of localizing the terms into Canadian French, it also uses a high number of Canadian French terms when the target language is set to “French”. One potential reason for this may be that the corpus used to train the tool for “French” contains a disproportionate number of examples from Canadian sources, and so there may be a problem of bias where the tool is amplifying Canadian French in the machine translation output.
Even though video games are highly popular, localization into Slovak is rather rare and the language struggles to maintain a presence in the video game industry. This is partly because Slovak is a less widely spoken language, and also because it is mutually intelligible with the more dominant Czech language, having a common history. Our paper examines the Slovak-Czech parallels in the respective language-, audiovisual- and multimedia- related legislation as well as market practices. A similar comparative analysis is conducted with other less widely spoken European languages, namely Serbian, Croatian and Slovenian. Our results show that among the examined languages, Czech is by far in the strongest position as a supported language in video games on various platforms whereas Slovak, Serbian, Croatian and Slovenian are hardly present. We hope that the results of our research will stimulate the discussion on this issue.
In this paper we describe how a COVID-19 phone app was localized by students of the MA program in Translation and Interpreting at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The project presented unique challenges including the urgency and short time-lines, less-than-optimal internationalization of the source code, limitations of the CAT tool, and the use of an open-source platform and crowd-sourced agile development model, in addition to particular linguistic aspects related to the new specialized subject matter, limited string context, and potentially sensitive data. On the other hand, it offered the opportunity to experience a real-life localization project, which had important pedagogical benefits for translation students. These and other aspects are described and suggestions proposed to enable similar projects to run smoothly.
Before the COVID-19 pandemic, telephone interpreters in Spain were used to communicating administrative issues, medical instructions, and even humanitarian social assistance rendered by social workers and psychologists. However, since March 2020 these interactions have been heavily replaced by conversations mediated by telephone interpreters related to severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) coronavirus infection. This contribution describes the provision of telephone interpreting during the COVID-19 pandemic using the information reported by the interpreters of the company Dualia Teletraducciones as a case study. It focuses on healthcare-related services and clients, offering data related to the frequency of use of telephone interpreting, the most common languages used, and the evolution of clients and services (Emergency Rooms, tracers, pandemic hotels, etc.). This article also describes the hiring, training and quality monitoring processes, including the main tools developed to facilitate remote interpreting during the pandemic.
With the emergence of video game localisation studies in the last decade, scholarly interest in translation studies in this young discipline has increased. Although globalisation has encouraged video game companies to offer their products in as many languages and markets as feasible, this academic discipline is still an under-researched area, especially in the Arab context. This article presents an overview to engender a better understanding of the nature of video games and their localisation in the Arab market. This market is distinct due to its culture, politics and language. In addition to the translational challenges related to the Arabic language, this study deals with the specificities of video game localisation from political, cultural and linguistic perspectives. This research offers a historical overview of the localisation of video games into Arabic since the inception of the practice, including an outline of the main localisation milestones in this field.
Clinical research using human participants to further medical knowledge has been at the forefront in 2021. Clinical research studying the efficacy of treatments can be categorised in two broad categories as ‘observational studies’ or ‘clinical trials’. Written from the perspective of a localization project manager at Vitaccess, which conducts global digital research for biopharmaceutical companies, this paper discusses five core challenges that impact the localization of such a study launched in France, Italy, Germany, Belgium, Spain, Japan, the UK, the US and Canada, conducted via a smartphone app. The localization project manager role provides a bridge between translators, revisers, ethics bodies, authors, legal, and medical reviewers, enabling oversight to keep the balance between launching the study globally and enabling each country to have the content and structure tailored to their cultural and linguistic expectations through localization. The main challenges in localizing a real-world evidence study is the complexity and volume of ethical, legal, and medical feedback required for the content of the study, which is further complicated by the need to target different countries and languages. Subjectivity and variance in the feedback per country also pose difficulties. International harmonisation of ethical, medical, and legal reviews of such global studies could streamline the process.
Digital labour platforms, encompassing on-demand translation work via apps and websites, have grown exponentially in recent years and have significant consequences for translation workers. This study explores the critical literature on digital labour platforms from a labour studies perspective and submits the findings of a quantitative survey of 70 translation workers residing in Turkey and working on/for digital labour platforms. Our research suggests that the introduction of digital labour platforms into translation production and business networks has not yet provided a significant contribution to the working conditions of translation workers in Turkey. Instead, we argue that their working conditions have been rearranged and reorganized in accordance with the uberization of (translation) work. According to the survey findings, engaging in such work on/for digital labour platforms exposes translation workers to risks related to employment status, income level, work-life balance, social protections, free agency, bargaining power, dependence on the platform, allocation of risks and rewards, and data collection, protection and privacy.
In a situation such as the COVID-19 pandemic, there is a need to distribute up-to-date public health information quickly and cost effectively in a wide range of languages and language varieties. Open Educational Resources (OER) are materials that are released under an open license and so can be freely accessed, used, adapted and shared with very few restrictions. There are currently few localization-related OER available, although the OER format could be a useful way of supporting localization efforts. This short article introduces the concept of OER, summarizes some key potential benefits of developing OER for the localization community, and presents Translating for Canada, eh? / Vous traduisez pour le Canada?, an OER that was developed to support localization efforts in Canadian English and French.
