COVID-19 is an unprecedented global health and socio-economic crisis, with cascading effects. In a bid to combat the pandemic, Jordan has imposed extreme measures, including border shutdowns, declaring a state of emergency, and a lockdown. These measures have had an adverse impact upon businesses and professions, including translation. Translators play a significant role in disseminating health information in times of crisis. This paper reports the results of a large-scale survey of translators’ perspectives in the Jordanian context on the pandemic and its effects on their role and profession during the time of COVID-19 restrictions. A quantitative five-scale Likert questionnaire was completed by 106 in-house and freelance professional translators. The results showed that COVID-19 has had adverse effects on translators in the Jordanian context. Translators faced several challenges during the pandemic, including career change or loss, lower income, increased workload and time pressure, high-level job demands, unclear job prospects, and anxiety about their future. The results also highlighted that language service providers (LSPs) as well as translators need to play a more active role during times of crisis. The findings of this study suggest that further research is necessary to investigate the effect of COVID-19 and similar pandemics on translators’ experiences of occupational stress and job satisfaction in Jordan.
The recent popularity of the fantasy genre in the Arabic world has seen increased translation activity into Arabic (De Blasio 2019). Despite this interest, scholars have focused their attention on low fantasy, with little attention to high fantasy. This study investigates book five of George R.R Martin’s novel series “A Dance with Dragons (2011), and its Arabic translation رقصة مع التنانين raqsa mc ?ltanani:n (2020) with a specific focus on Toponyms. The study uses textual analysis of the translation of book five of the novel series to determine the translation procedures used, and interviews with the official translator to understand the factors behind the translation choices in the series. The study adopts Aixelá’s 1996 model of culture-specific items (CSI) for the classification of the translation procedures. The results indicate the prevalence of two main translation procedures; conservation and substitution. The two procedures are used to strike a balance between the readability of the text, readers’ expectations, and maintaining the fantasy of the secondary world in which the narrative takes place.
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