Abstract This study explores the relevance of the concept of legal survivals, proposed by the legal scholar Rafał Mańko, for legal translation purposes. The concept of legal survivals, in parallel to the well-known notion of legal transplants, problematises a specific aspect of legal continuity, namely the continued existence of certain units of legal culture despite transformations of a given jurisdiction’s legal system. Translating texts relating to such institutions raises difficult questions for legal translators, who need to consider the legal and/or terminological changes to establish acceptable equivalents. This article uses the translational comparative legal analysis framework to investigate the usefulness of Mańko’s theory for legal translation through three case studies of the Polish–English translation of property law terms. The research shows that the legal survivals theory may be useful in helping translators better comprehend the not-always-parallel paths of legal terminology and legal institutions and encouraging a kind of ‘legal genealogy’.
Translator style is one of the two major focuses of corpus-based translation studies, alongside features of translated language. A critical examination of existing definitions and studies of translator style reveals that two crucial dimensions of the concept tend to be neglected: (1) the potential for a translator's way of translating to vary across their works and change over time, and (2) specific aspects of a translator's style that are similar to those of other translators. This article discusses the extent to which the metaphors for translator style capture the characteristics of the concept. It proposes a revised definition of translator style that highlights changes over time as an important trait. The proposed definition also emphasises that shared stylistic elements among translators may constitute part of an individual translator's overall unique style. In light of this definition, the identification of a translator's style does not have to rely on comparing the works of different translators. This article demonstrates how this framework can be used to investigate a single translator's style by analysing Howard Goldblatt's translation style through explicitation and implicitation in his translations of reporting verbs in Mo Yan's novels, both collectively and over time.
Large language models (LLMs) have shown significant potential in translation tasks but often struggle with literary texts. This study compares professional human translations with translations produced by two AI-driven systems that coordinate multiple LLM-based agents. The first system mimics professional human translation practice, with distinct drafting and revision phases. The second redesigns the process specifically for LLMs' capabilities, breaking translation into granular steps with specialized AI agents handling strategic planning, stylistic refinement, and coherence checking. Expert evaluations revealed that both AI systems achieved accuracy comparable to professional human translators. The LLM-capability-driven system produced translations with superior stylistic qualities and poetic language, though it occasionally added extraneous content. Meanwhile, the practice-derived system delivered concise translations but sometimes lacked cohesive flow. Blind evaluations showed that the translations from both AI systems were frequently preferred over human translations, particularly in terms of fluency. This study demonstrates that rethinking translation workflows around LLM capabilities can yield exceptional results, sometimes surpassing human performance in certain aspects.
The blended concept of translaboration aims to explore the reciprocal engagement of translation and collaboration in each other's enterprises. This study conceptualizes Xu Bing's art installation Phoenix from the translaborative perspective as an artistic translation of China's social realities and examines how Xu performs his subjectivity as an 'artistranslator' during the translation. Furthermore, since the production of Phoenix involves various human and non-human collaborators, and can therefore be seen as a co-translation, this study investigates how Xu's subjectivity is encouraged and restricted by other actors in their translaboration. It finds that human and non-human actors can enjoy equally active roles in translaboration and deserve the same level of attention, countering the general tendency in Translation Studies to center on the former's collaboration on, instead of with, the latter. This study also reaffirms the epistemological effectiveness of translation in probing artistic processes and products, which could help enhance our understanding of translation, art, and their translaboration.
The impact of foreignized elements on child and adult readers' comprehension of translated children's picture books is a complex matter with numerous confounding variables. This study investigates how child and adult readers process foreignized elements in translated Chinese picture books. In an eye-tracking experiment, we found that while foreignized lexical items consistently affected the real-time processing at the initial stage, whether they induced processing difficulty during late-stage processing mainly depended on the context in which they occurred. Our results also showed that children relied more on pictures than adults in reading translated picture books, especially when the text was complicated. Finally, through an attitude test, we found that child and adult readers held different opinions toward foreignization, with children favoring foreignization when the text was relatively easy and adults preferring domestication irrespective of text difficulties.
As concise self-contained units of meaning at the interface of artworks and their publics, artwork titles give important insights into what is at stake in mediation in transcultural settings, under particular contextual conditions: stable visual input with cross-over of languages and cultures, and thus activation of multiple frames of reference and expectations for audiences. They are revealing microcosms of morphosyntactic, lexical and pragmalinguistic triggers of spectatorial responses. Implications extend to other mediation forms with similarly unique but more complex characteristics, like interlingual subtitling. Artwork titles are used here to identify features of mediation in these distinct forms of expression, from a cross-cultural pragmatics perspective with an underpinning from systemic functional linguistics (SFL). Implications are taken up with the more challenging case of interlingual subtitles.
This article examines the 1905 Chinese translation of The Swiss Family Robinson through an ecocritical lens and explores how ecological themes are adapted and reinterpreted within a non-Western cultural context. The study draws on traditional Chinese literary and philosophical concepts such as (sic)(sic) shanshui 'mountain and water', (sic)(sic) fengjing 'wind-light', and (sic)(sic) wuwei 'non-action' to expound the relationship between humans and nature in translation. By comparing the translation with the original text, this study finds that while the original text presents a utilitarian view of nature, the Chinese version accentuates the aesthetics of the island, elevates it to a utopian space, and emphasizes moral obligations toward nonhuman life. Despite its strong ecocentrism, the translation also reveals a predilection for anthropocentrism and positions human beings as superior to animals. The coexistence of both ecocentrism and anthropocentrism suggests that they are not mutually exclusive. The article also contextualizes these shifts within the tumultuous socio-political landscape of the late Qing dynasty and argues that the translation responds to the broader social milieu of the time. By situating ecological consciousness within the practice of translation, this study forges a link between ecocriticism and Translation Studies. It further demonstrates that ecological awareness existed in historical contexts where it had not yet emerged as a dominant framework, which reveals its embeddedness in cross-cultural exchanges.
This article argues that translation inevitably reaches beyond its immediate sociohistorical context by deviating from contemporaneous norms. These deviations may signal and respond to future norms. Spectrality, a theory of time progression and the historical future proposed by Jacques Derrida in 1993, refutes the triumphant, teleological vision of liberal democracy after the collapse of the USSR and suggests that alternative futures already exist. Spectrality theory has gained renewed relevance in recent years, as global uncertainties caused by pandemics and conflicts have destabilized people’s vision of a liberalized future in the post-Cold War era. From a Derridean spectral standpoint, the present study demonstrates that the inexplicable deviations from norms in translation at a certain time may actually adhere to the norms of the future. This paper presents a case study of the 1988 translation of spectral elements in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (1927) in the People’s Republic of China (1949–), immediately before the end of the Cold War. Despite being subject to a Marxist reading in the 1980s, this initial Chinese translation of the spectral figure in To the Lighthouse circumvented the materialist interpretation and foreshadowed the liberalized future in the 2000s, which emerged beyond human control. In addition to conceptualizing patterns and regularities based on adherence to norms to predict the future — an established approach in Descriptive Translation Studies — this paper proposes another way of perceiving the time to come: by examining deviations from norms.
Typological influences on translating manner-of-motion have been extensively examined, but few studies have analyzed whether the 'thinking-for-translating' hypothesis extends to other semantic domains and how factors like directionality and proficiency interact with typology. Using Stosic's (2020) framework for multi-domain manner analysis, this study, which draws on the Parallel Corpus of Chinese EFL Learners, analyzes a bidirectional corpus of 8008 target texts translating twenty-four manner verbs and adjuncts between Chinese (equipollently-framed) and English (satellite-framed) by learners with varying English proficiency. The results reveal that: (1) Directionality affects manner transfer, with higher manner verb transfer in Chinese-to-English translation and higher manner adjunct transfer in English-to-Chinese translation; (2) English proficiency influences manner transfer, though with small effect sizes; (3) the effects of proficiency on manner transfer differ by translation directionality. These findings expand the 'thinking-for-translating' hypothesis to more semantic domains and offer implications for considering directionality and typology in translation training.
This study investigates the translation strategies and prevailing approaches applied by Arab translators in translating the s-word. To achieve this aim, a corpus of ninety Hollywood films released between 2000 and 2018 was utilized. Both quantitative and qualitative analyses were conducted on a self-designed parallel and aligned corpus of the English dialogue and Arabic subtitles. The findings indicate that the cultural substitution strategy is most commonly used in subtitling s-words, followed by the reformulation strategy. The functions of s-words appear to influence the choice of subtitling strategies. The use of Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) for the subtitling of these films also restricts the linguistic options available to subtitlers. Additionally, the affordances of audiovisual translation play a role in subtitler choices since the meaning of a word can be conveyed through gestures, images, or sounds on screen.
