Research on psychosocial risk factors in Lithuania has increasingly focused on employees’ workplace experiences; however, the well-being of translators and interpreters—particularly those working in Lithuania’s courts—remains underexplored. Interpreting is widely recognized as a high-stress activity (Roziner and Shlesinger 2010), making this group especially relevant for psychosocial risk assessment. Translators, meanwhile, also experience significant occupational stress (Courtney and Phelan 2019). This study investigates psychosocial risks among court translators and interpreters in Lithuania using a survey-based approach. The questionnaire classified risk factors into five domains: work environment, work demands, work organization, work content, and interpersonal relationships. Responses were measured using a five-point Likert scale and analysed through correlation matrices to identify patterns and associations. On this basis, the results are considered reliable. They provide insights into the prevalence and acceptability of psychosocial risks in translation and interpreting contexts, contribute to occupational health research, and help identify aspects requiring improvement to ensure acceptable working conditions for translators and interpreters in Lithuania’s courts.
Adverts are part of linguistic landscape both reflecting and influencing the processes in language. This article examines instances of code-switching in Latvian translated advertising. Code-switching in advertising appears to be topic-related: the largest number of cases seems to occur in the field of technologies due to its rapid development; however, other fields—particularly those of somewhat lesser economic significance, such as cosmetics—demonstrate it as well. English influence in advertising leads to hybridisation, orthographic changes, semantic changes, and awkward syntactic constructions, partly perpetuated by machine translation and other AI tools. Although AI technologies have improved over the period of the study, as demonstrated by several examples, human-led expertise is still required in the transcreation of advertising.
This article examines the translation of the names of Lithuanian mythological household and water beings into English. It explores how these beings function within mythological tales, what cultural meanings they embody, and the specific challenges their names pose for translators. The study addresses issues related to the choice between domestication and foreignization strategies, with a focus on maintaining the cultural specificity of the source text while ensuring its comprehensibility for English-speaking readers. Employing a comparative cultural approach, the article analyses selected mythological names and proposes possible translation solutions. The discussion is supported by illustrative examples drawn from the English translation of Norbertas Vėlius’ collection of Lithuanian mythological tales.
This paper is part of a series of articles on the censorship of religious motives in Soviet-era Lithuanian translations. It deals with the 1947 Lithuanian translation of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath by Karolis Vairas-Račkauskas, in particular focussing on the translation of the novel’s title. The study makes use of two translation manuscripts, revealing the translator’s choices at different stages of translation. The title of the published translation diverged from the translator’s final choice and replicated the precedent Russian translation. Based on foreign literary criticism, the paper overviews J. Steinbeck’s use of Christian symbols and images in the novel and argues that the modification of the title in translation narrowed the meaning potential of the original, emphasizing the interpretation that suited Soviet ideology. The Soviet-era paratexts by Lithuanian and Russian critics are also discussed, attesting to the effort to shape the reception of the novel for Soviet readers in one particular direction.
This paper investigates how foregrounding is realized in Virginia Woolf’s The Mark on the Wall and its Albanian version Njolla në Mur (translated by Elvana Zaimi). Adopting a comparative stylistic approach, the study examines deviations at the graphological/phonological, lexicogrammatical, and semantic levels, identifying how these stylistic effects are preserved, transformed, or neutralized in translation. Close reading, supported by selective corpus insights, reveals a clear hierarchy of translatability: graphological and phonological foregrounding is the most vulnerable to change, lexicogrammatical markedness is largely maintained, and semantic foregrounding, especially metaphors and figurative patterns, shows the highest degree of preservation. The findings reveal that Woolf’s modernist style is partially reshaped in Albanian, with the translator prioritizing semantic fidelity and syntactic rhythm over sound-based or punctuation-driven effects. By analyzing a less studied language pair, the study contributes to a broader understanding of how modernist stylistic innovation travels across linguistic and cultural contexts.
As a case study, the article examines the Lithuanian translation of the Latvian children’s novel Mežonīgie pīrāgi: Dienvidjūras pasaka (“Wild Pirogis: A South Sea Tale”) by Māris Putniņš, a text rich in gastronomic metaphors and anthropomorphic food characters. Translating these culturally embedded elements requires balancing linguistic fidelity with creative adaptation to preserve the text’s humour, cultural context, and accessibility for young readers. The analysis highlights the challenges of rendering culturally specific elements—such as food names, character identities, and intertextual references—within a closely related yet distinct language pair. Translating food involves not only linguistic adaptation but also cultural interpretation, navigating between foreignization and domestication strategies. Drawing on gastropoetics and imagology, the study demonstrates how the translation of food shapes national and cultural representations (van Doorslaer 2019). The findings emphasize that food functions not only as a narrative device but also as a means of intercultural exchange, showing how literary translation negotiates between linguistic accuracy and cultural resonance.
This article is one of the first studies to examine the use of translation as evidence in Lithuanian court proceedings. It outlines the ways translation enters the judicial process, the involvement of translators and expert linguists, and their respective roles in the process of translation and assessment. Drawing on three case studies, the article demonstrates how translation can itself become challenged in court and analyses the approaches courts employ when assessing the language of the original in relation to the translated text. It draws attention to questionable or flawed practices in determining meaning and raises concerns about the limited linguistic competence of judicial decision makers. It also addresses issues relating to the role and responsibility of the expert linguist.
False friends are pairs of words in two or more languages that resemble each other in form (spelling, pronunciation, or both) but differ in meaning, often leading to misunderstandings or mistranslations. Unfortunately, like any other linguistic units, they are subject to change. The growing influence of English can be observed in many languages of the world, including Latvian. This has lead to the semantic broadening of some words previously considered strict and well-known false friends. The aim of this paper is to determine the actual use of five diachronically changing false friends in Latvian. A contrastive dictionary analysis is employed, along with excerpts from the press and a corpus. A survey of Latvian interpreters was also conducted to explore their experiences. The results provide evidence that some false friends are now predominantly used in Latvian with their English meaning, thus having partially become “true friends”, and highlight the need to assess the current usage of other false friends.
The paper proposes a new approach to the productive polysemous category of diminutive derivatives in Lithuanian. Drawing on the works of cognitive linguistics, the multiple senses of the diminutive are interpreted with reference to the family-resemblance principle. Small size is treated as the prototypical sense, which gives rise to other senses, such as a short period of time, affection, depreciation, etc. Many senses are motivated by metaphor, metonymy, and other mechanisms. The ironic sense is different in that, in each case, it emerges in context through juxtaposition of propositional and intentional frames. Irony is seen as an extension of any of the above senses. The realisation of the ironic sense is analysed in the first ten sections of the novel “Forest of the Gods” by the Lithuanian writer Balys Sruoga and its translation into English, a language known for its limited inventory of derivational diminutives. In the majority of cases, the English translation seems to favour non-diminutive words.
The article presents an overview of translations from Lithuanian and Latvian into Italian during the last five years (2019–2023). It aims to update previous data on Baltic literatures in Italy and to examine their current status. Additionally, it seeks to identify the main differences between the reception of Lithuanian and Latvian literature in Italy and to assess recent developments and emerging trends in this field. Translations of Lithuanian and Latvian works into Italian published during the analysed period are first reviewed by genre: prose, children’s literature, poetry, essays, and scientific literature. Information about upcoming translations known to the author is also provided. Statistical data are presented and compared with data from earlier periods. The analysis reveals a significant recent increase in translations of children’s and young people’s literature. However, the period 2019–2023 has also seen the publication of notable novels and short story collections from both languages, as well as poetry anthologies and important scholarly works originally written in Lithuanian. The statistics indicate that the past five years have been as productive as the preceding five-year period. Given the very small number of translators working with these languages, this is a positive achievement. Another encouraging trend is that Baltic literatures are beginning to attract the attention of larger publishing houses, which can provide better visibility for these works.
Political and ideological terms have been widely used in languages for centuries, their denotational and connotational meaning though fluctuates, reflecting the changing ideological trends. Ideology becomes part of the meaning of these lexemes. It is also compounded into mental structures, which naturally may vary across different ideological groups. Broad uncertainty and ambiguity can be seen in texts: people have varying understandings and ascribe different meanings to political terms on the basis of their experience, political preferences, and the swinging impact of mainstream media. The paper investigates the semantics of the terms liberal and liberalism by analyzing their co-occurrence patterns in corpora of four languages: English, German, Russian, and Latvian. The co-occurrence analysis of corpora reveals that while there are core similarities in the semantics of liberal and liberalism across languages, each language also imbues these terms with unique cultural and historical connotations. This information is contrasted with the dictionary lemmas of the terms which mostly seem to reflect the old meanings. While dictionary definitions provide a baseline understanding, co-occurrence patterns in language use offer deeper insights into how these terms are perceived and interpreted across different societies. This, in its turn, affects the possible translation strategies.
This article reinterprets Mykhailo Kotsiubynskyi’s “Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors” by moving beyond the traditional view of the novel as a Hutsul “Romeo and Juliet” tale centered on a family feud. Applying Carl Jung’s theory of archetypes, the study explores how the narrative unfolds deeper psychological themes, including the Shadow, the Anima, the Wise Old Man, and the Changeling. The analysis reveals that the true essence of the novel lies in the protagonist’s struggle with his darker nature, his unfulfilled redemption, and the symbolic duality of the feminine, offering a universal exploration of identity, duality, and the human psyche. The authors integrate the overlapping of paganism and Christianity in the novel with the theory of archetypes, emphasizing how these elements shape the protagonist’s character and fate.
The article examines the lexical and morphological features of newspeak in Laimantas Jonušys’s Lithuanian translation of David Mitchell’s dystopian novel Cloud Atlas. The research material is drawn from an excerpt of the chapter “Teliūskas perkėla i visa paskum” (pp. 279–308) and its corresponding part in the original text (pp. 213–236). In the translation, the features of newspeak are conveyed through lexical and semantic neologisms, occasional and potential formations, as well as typical and atypical derivational variants. Additionally, literally translated and passive lexical layer words play distinctive roles. The findings demonstrate that formation by analogy and the recognizable variability of specifying lexical and morphological elements in relation to standard language contribute to a convincing representation of the dystopia’s artistic vision, effectively rendering the original newspeak and its post-apocalyptic impression.
This paper explores the topic of totalitarian realia, represented by Sovietisms in the Soviet Union, from linguistic, ideological, and translation-oriented perspectives. Sovietisms can be categorized into two types: conventional and abbreviation-based. An analysis of three translations of Ukrainian Soviet-era literary works, which make extensive use of Sovietisms, identifies 139 examples. The primary focus of this paper is on abbreviation-based Sovietisms, which constitute 65.5% of the research corpus, encompass many unique linguistic phenomena, and are predominantly rendered through a domesticating approach (76%), despite the nation-narrating objectives of their translators. Based on this analysis, the key strategies for translating abbreviation-based Sovietisms into English are outlined. Additionally, an alternative strategy, termed combined renomination (calque), is proposed for foreignization-oriented nation-narrating translations involving abbreviation-based Sovietisms.
This article aims to introduce readers to the Lithuanian Eurolect and stimulate research on this underexplored topic. It provides a brief overview of Eurolects—i.e., Europeanized variants of EU official languages shaped by translation and language contact. The article reviews existing studies on Eurolects and explores the hypothetical Lithuanian Eurolect. It outlines systematic approaches to studying this phenomenon with the aid of corpora and suggests potential research avenues, including lexical, grammatical, and discourse features of Eurolects.
This paper aims to explore the relationship between drama translation and ideology in contemporary Turkish theatre. After delineating the distinction between state/city theatres and independent (private/alternative) theatres, it will then focus on the 2000s with a special emphasis on the translation activities of independent (private/alternative) theatres. In particular, it shall draw attention to how actor/director translators working with or for these theatres have become significant cultural agents and have challenged the status quo by either choosing to translate plays with provocative content or by retranslating plays that were forced to undergo (self-)censorship. The paper will also challenge the general impression in the Turkish context that the reason for retranslating classical plays into Turkish is merely a need to follow and reflect contemporary changes in the language.
Light waves change direction—refract—as they pass through different environments. Similarly, Western literary works, even after leaking through the barrier of the Soviet Index Librorum Prohibitorum, never reached the USSR reader in their authentic form. The most evident components of the unfavourable environment were the proxy of the Moscow Raduga and Progress publishing houses, ideologically committed literary criticism, the hunt for honorariums, the lack of reference books, and the poverty of printing technology. All these adverse factors together caused the chronic syndrome of texts that seemed authentic but in fact were not. So far, individual agents and effects of textual refraction have been researched, and interesting case studies have been carried out. However, there is a lack of both a systematic classification of the different agents of influence and an assessment of their long-term effects. The methodological study of refraction-affected editions tests the possibility of integrating the concept of textual condition with the assertions of the postcolonial theory regarding secondary cultural colonisation. The paper attempts to raise the hypothesis that the efforts of professional translators and editors to perform their work with the utmost craftsmanship had sometimes paradoxically reinforced the refraction of the overall meaning of major literary works. That resulted from the contrast between a relatively reliable translation and the implications generated by the bibliographic code and metatexts, as well as from the canonisation of translations that had become iconic in the Soviet-era.
The article addresses the issue of the translation of fiction in different periods of time under the influence of various linguistic, social and cultural norms, and it aims to establish differences in the use of translation strategies employed by the translator. The paper reviews the descriptive approach in Translation Studies which argues that translation is a communicative as well as social act where the translator alone is not responsible for his/her translational behaviour; other people and institutions also contribute to the formation of common notions of translational behaviour, and these are termed norms, conventions or rules. Moreover, the research emphasizes that norms are not a stable phenomenon and may vary across different periods of time and across different cultures or communities. The research is based on the contrastive analysis of two translations of Jack London’s Martin Eden with the aim to establish differences in the use of translation strategies under the influence of translation norms.
The article provides insight into the development of translation criticism from 1920s to 1980s in Latvia by offering translations of excerpts from theoretical texts that map important events in translation history. We start with the book, published in 1924, which evaluated the 1689 translation of the Bible into Latvian, then concentrate on a polemical article by Rainis (1925) on his innovative 1897 rendition of Goethe’s Faust and finish the analysis with a discussion of a work written in 1984. The latter stood out during the Soviet era by drawing attention to the aesthetic values of translation, contrasting with the prevailing focus on linguistic aspects, specifically the quality of the Latvian language. Each of these three works, in its own manner, exerted influence both on the historico-philosophical ideas of its era and on the evolution of translation in Latvia. The review and translations of these three excerpts are contextualized through an analysis of Latvian translation history. It is stressed that despite censorship, the Soviet-time translations spread the ideas that often contradicted the Soviet ideology as well as opened new broader vistas for language use.
In this article I raise two questions concerning ethics: Was it ethical to interpret in the way that was done in academic film clubs in Soviet Estonia, where Western films that were banned from public screenings in cinemas were simultaneously interpreted in the 1970s and 1980s, and is it ethical to respond to those interpreters’ best efforts in the way the audience responded to my presentation fifty years later? The non-professional interpreting practice in question violates contemporary codes of ethics (accuracy, impartiality, etc.) and goes against current interpreting techniques (condensation, omission, etc.). The interpreters applied creative cross-cultural communication, but was this ethical? This practice ensured accessibility to renowned works of cinematography as without interpretation the screening of those films in the original version might have not taken place. The outcome was shaped by the implicit expectations of the viewers. In 2022, the response to my presentation on this type of film interpreting at a conference was hilarious.
