31.534, Review: Translation: Ji, Oakes (2019)

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-31-534. Wed Feb 05 2020. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 31.534, Review: Translation: Ji, Oakes (2019)

Moderator: Malgorzata E. Cavar (linguist at linguistlist.org)
Student Moderator: Jeremy Coburn
Managing Editor: Becca Morris
Team: Helen Aristar-Dry, Everett Green, Sarah Robinson, Peace Han, Nils Hjortnaes, Yiwen Zhang, Julian Dietrich
Jobs: jobs at linguistlist.org | Conferences: callconf at linguistlist.org | Pubs: pubs at linguistlist.org

Homepage: http://linguistlist.org

Please support the LL editors and operation with a donation at:
           https://funddrive.linguistlist.org/donate/

Editor for this issue: Jeremy Coburn <jecoburn at linguistlist.org>
================================================================


Date: Wed, 05 Feb 2020 21:40:18
From: Mario Bisiada [mario at mariobisiada.de]
Subject: Advances in Empirical Translation Studies

 
Discuss this message:
http://linguistlist.org/pubs/reviews/get-review.cfm?subid=36562177


Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/30/30-2865.html

EDITOR: Meng  Ji
EDITOR: Michael  Oakes
TITLE: Advances in Empirical Translation Studies
SUBTITLE: Developing Translation Resources and Technologies
PUBLISHER: Cambridge University Press
YEAR: 2019

REVIEWER: Mario Bisiada, Universitat Pompeu Fabra

SUMMARY

''Advances in Empirical Translation Studies'', edited by Meng Ji and Michael
Oakes, argues that, through the use of ''translational corpora and empirical
resources'' (p. 5), boundaries between descriptive and applied translation
research are being pushed, and the stated aim of this volume is to ''reflect
and add momentum to this general trend of disciplinary growth and development
by encouraging continued exchange, interaction and dialogue between
descriptive and applied translation studies'' (p. 5).

The volume starts with an introductory chapter, written by one of the editors,
Meng Ji. It is a brief overview of how empirical translation studies
developed, discussing its foundations in product- and process-oriented
translation studies and arguing for an increasing interaction between
descriptive and applied translation studies. The chapter then discusses some
advances in empirical research methodologies before introducing one of the
book's central claims, the ''Social Turn'' in empirical translation studies.
As part of this concept, the book seeks to challenge ''the traditional
intra-disciplinary division between pure and applied research'' (p. 8) by the
''development of the advanced research methodologies applied in translation
studies'' (p. 8) as well as of multilingual resources and analytical
infrastructure.

The second chapter, also by Meng Ji, then exemplifies this proposed method
through an ''empirical multilingual analytical instrument'', a cross-sectoral
interaction index to assess ''the communication of environmental knowledge and
shared management strategies'' (p. 26) in order to measure the ''environmental
performance'' of the country (p. 18).

The third chapter, written by the second editor of the book, Michael Oakes, is
a demonstration of a range of statistical tests using R applied to
corpus-based studies. The chapter is divided into corpus-based and
corpus-driven research. For the former, the t-test, linear regression and
ANOVA are demonstrated. For corpus-driven experiments, a principal components
analysis is demonstrated.

Chapter 4, written by Mark Seligman, surveys the role of semantics in machine
translation today. For this purpose, he presents an overview of past
approaches to machine translation such as a range of rule-based translation
methods as well as statistical and neural machine translation. Seligman then
argues for the benefits of perceptually grounded semantics for machine
translation and natural language processing.

Chapter 5 is again written by Meng Ji, with Glenn Hook and Fukumoto Fumiyo,
and is concerned with the translation of the World Health Organisation
drinking-water-quality guidelines in Japan. Based on a Japanese-English
terminology database, it traces the translation and dissemination of those
guidelines to argue, among other things, that newspapers are an important
source of information in Japan when compared to political, industrial and
business sources.

Chapter 6, written by Laura Löfberg and Paul Rayson, is an overview of
multilingual automatic semantic annotation systems and their extension to new
languages, drawing on a semantic analysis system developed at the University
of Lancaster, the UCREL semantic analysis system. It offers an overview of
past approaches to semantic annotation and tagging and then discusses some
multilingual applications of the semantic analysis developed by the authors.

Chapter 7 is authored by Sara Moze and Simon Krek and is an instructive
article about the usefulness of Sketch Engine for translators. The authors
demonstrate how to perform context and collocation searches and show the
engine's main feature, the word sketch. They demonstrate how translators can
make use of the tool to achieve idiomatic collocations and find translation
alternatives and also show how translators can extract terminology with this
tool.

Chapter 8 is another chapter written by Meng Ji, along with Zhaoming Gao, and
is concerned with readability of translated Chinese health texts. It
demonstrates a Chinese readability system developed by the authors, who argue
in their findings that the total number of words, characters and punctuation
marks, types of words, consecutive noun phrases and adjective + noun phrases
are ''highly related to the information load of Chinese health materials'' (p.
160).

Chapter 9, written by Masaaki Nagata is another chapter on machine
translation. We again find a small overview of rule-based and statistical
machine translation before the author argues for pre-ordering as an
advantageous method to translate head-final languages such as Japanese. Nagata
proposes a per-ordering method for English-to-Japanese translation in order to
address the differences of word order between the languages.

Chapter 10 is an overview of tendencies in audiovisual translation studies
written by Jorge Díaz-Cintas. He surveys a range of issues concerning this
field such as multimodality and the many translation practices subsumed under
the heading of audiovisual translation studies. Finally, some current issues
such as social inclusion and the influence of computer-assisted translation
tools on the subdiscipline are identified as research areas of current
interest.

Chapter 11, by Constantin Orǎsan, Carla Parra Escartí­n, Lianet Sepúlveda
Torres and Eduard Barbu, is an exploration of data-driven translation
technologies developed as part of the EXPERT research project. They describe
the project and discuss its innovations on translation memories and how
translators can use the tools developed by the project.

Chapter 12 is written by Mark Seligman and Alex Waibel and presents an
overview of speech-to-speech translation technologies and some issues that
confront those systems, such as dimensions of design choice and human factors
that intervene in the translation activity. They then present some present-day
environments of speech-to-speech translation, such as Google Translate, Skype
Translator and Microsoft's Presentation translator.

Chapter 13, written again by the editors Meng Ji and Michael Oakes, summarises
the studies in the book and argues once again for the social turn in empirical
translation studies.

EVALUATION

The book provides a wide range of empirical research on translation, covering
the most important areas where research in the area of empirical translation
studies takes place. Most of the chapters are useful as brief introductions to
the fields they touch upon and offer themselves as introductory readings for
advanced modules in translation studies with an empirical focus. The chapter
on statistics is welcome, as a solid demonstration of how to conduct
statistical analysis in corpus-assisted translation studies is not easy to
come by. The book offers an accessible account and walkthrough of commonly
applied statistical procedures in tried and tested areas of corpus research,
especially the ANOVA, while also discussing mixed models approaches, which are
indeed rarely applied in translation studies as the book argues.

The individual chapters by themselves may not contain strikingly new
information for people working in the particular field, and their instructive
value is at times somewhat lowered by a lack of contextualisation through
references to related studies, but the contribution of the volume is to
collect a range of overviews in one and to thus introduce scholars working in
one field to the basics of a neighbouring field -- even though this is not
among the things the book seeks to achieve according to the introduction.

The first chapter provides a good overview of how empirical translation
studies evolved from the beginnings, though there is a strange absence of
discussion of recent work done in the field. Such a discussion should have
included, at the very least, obvious works that aimed to establish empirical
translation studies as a subfield such as Hansen (2002), Carl, Bangalore &
Schaeffer (2015) and de Sutter, Lefer & Delaere (2017), or, given that Toury
is cited extensively, Pym, Shlesinger & Simeoni (2008). Curiously, not even
the works where the editors were involved, such as Ji (2016), Ji et al (2016)
and Laviosa et al (2016), are cited here.

The reader cannot help but notice that the book treats the chapters somewhat
unequally. Chapter 1 describes the three main existing research areas of
empirical translation studies, though, as argued above, citing very few
studies that exemplify those areas. What is described in the preface as the
''fourth wave'' of advances (p. xiii) turns out in Section 1.4 to consist in
the studies reported in Chapters 5 and 8 in this book, with no mention of the
other contributions or references to related studies to contextualise the
analytical instruments proposed. Without such contextualisation, I had a hard
time understanding how the book justifies talking about a ''wave'' of
research. In the final chapter, which mirrors the first chapter, the ''social
turn'' the book tries to identify is justified by reference to ''practical,
pressing social issues'' (p. 255), for which basically two examples are given:
environmental policy translation and accessibility of medical translation,
treated in Chapters 5 and 8. Section 13.2 is devoted exclusively to discussing
the inter-relation of Chapters 2, 5 and 8 over a total of 5 pages, while the
remaining eight chapters are treated summarily over just two pages in the
following section.

The final chapter gives a perspective on the development of empirical
translation studies and largely mirrors the first chapter. Its instructive
value again would have been significantly improved had some exemplary studies
been given for the claims made here. Take, for instance, the paragraph on p.
253, which contains a lot of interesting and perhaps valid claims, which
however backs up none of them by a single reference. The discussion of
''challenges and opportunities'' here cites only the standard works of
descriptive translation studies and key texts from 2004 plus the editors' own
2012 book. Reading this final chapter, I could not shake the feeling of
listening to someone talk in a large, empty assembly hall: the book here makes
no attempt to take in other researchers in the field or to aid in constructing
this very promising field of research by situating itself in an existing body
of research. This discussion presents a missed opportunity to talk about at
least some existing and exciting work in this field, which has evolved a lot
more than this concluding chapter might make us think.

What exactly pertains to a research strand called ''empirical translation
studies'' is certainly not an easy question to answer, but any successful book
that seeks to appropriate this label for its research and to advance it as a
field should tackle that question, and contextualise its own work within that
field to continue building on strong foundations. Early corpus work is cited,
but recent studies are not mentioned; it almost seems as though the editors
did not want to prioritise some works over others and so have decided to not
mention any. If this was so, however, it should be communicated to the reader.
Plenty of work has been done in corpus-based, corpus-driven and process-based
translation studies, eye-tracking/keylogging and many other disciplines, none
of which is mentioned here. Some focus is given to statistics and
multidimensional analysis, which may be justifiable by the editors' own
interests, but again very few studies are cited that have actually applied
those methods.

Overall, then, while the book does present new case studies, there is a
certain lack of balance in how it showcases them and involves them in their
argument for a ''social turn'' in empirical translation studies. Some
chapters, even though they present work in highly active areas of empirical
translation studies, are just given cursory attention, while the book's weight
is obviously carried by the two ''core chapters'' 5 and 8, which are discussed
at length but will be interesting mainly to scholars working on those
particular topics. The other chapters dedicate a lot of space to overviews of
the foundations, while not always providing sufficient contextualisation to
serve as a starting point for new researchers. Perhaps the book's real value,
then, lies in its displaying of a wide range of different research areas where
work takes place within empirical translation studies. Whether its chapters
are accessible enough and provide the necessary bibliographic foundation to
inspire and aid further research in that area and thus make it useful as an
introductory volume will depend on each reader, but does demand some previous
knowledge in each field. A clearer editorial approach to what the book wants
to be and a more equal treatment of the chapters would have made this a much
better contribution to the field of empirical translation studies.

REFERENCES

Carl, M., Bangalore, S., & Schaeffer, M. (2015). New Directions in Empirical
Translation Process Research: Exploring the CRITT TPR-DB. Springer.

Hansen, G. (2002). Empirical Translation Studies: Process and Product.
Samfundslitteratur.

Ji, M. (2016). Empirical Translation Studies: Interdisciplinary Methodologies
Explored. Equinox Publishing Limited.

Ji, M., Oakes, M., Defeng, L., & Hareide, L. (2016). Corpus Methodologies
Explained: An empirical approach to translation studies. Routledge.

Laviosa, S., Pagano, A., Kemppanen, H., & Ji, M. (2016). Textual and
Contextual Analysis in Empirical Translation Studies. Springer.

Pym, A., Shlesinger, M., & Simeoni, D. (2008). Beyond Descriptive Translation
Studies: Investigations in Homage to Gideon Toury. John Benjamins Publishing.

Sutter, G. D., Lefer, M.-A., & Delaere, I. (2017). Empirical Translation
Studies: New Methodological and Theoretical Traditions. Walter de Gruyter GmbH
& Co KG.


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Mario Bisiada is a Tenure-Track Lecturer in Translation and Language Studies
at Pompeu Fabra University. He received his PhD from the University of
Manchester for a corpus-based study of language change in German through
translation from English, with translation as a site of language contact. He
has gone on to publish a range of articles on the linguistic influence of
editors on the translated text, where he argues for a greater awareness of
mediators in corpus studies of translated language. His more recent research
deals with cross-linguistic discourse analysis of concepts and their emergence
through metaphoric or paralinguistic devices such as hashtags, with his most
recent publication being a study of the emergence and use of the “homework”
metaphor in newspaper discourse.





------------------------------------------------------------------------------

***************************    LINGUIST List Support    ***************************
 The 2019 Fund Drive is under way! Please visit https://funddrive.linguistlist.org
  to find out how to donate and check how your university, country or discipline
     ranks in the fund drive challenges. Or go directly to the donation site:
               https://iufoundation.fundly.com/the-linguist-list-2019

                        Let's make this a short fund drive!
                Please feel free to share the link to our campaign:
                    https://funddrive.linguistlist.org/donate/
 


----------------------------------------------------------
LINGUIST List: Vol-31-534	
----------------------------------------------------------