Abstract:William Shakespeare is one of the world's greatest writers. His plays have been translated into every major living language. In some languages, his plays have been re-translated many times. These translations and re-translations have evolved for about 250 years. Studying variations in translations of world cultural heritage texts is of cross-cultural interest for arts and humanities researchers. The variations between re-translations are due to numerous factors including the differing purposes of translations, genetic relations, cultural and intercultural influences, rivalry between translators, and their varying competence. A team of Digital Humanities researchers has collected an experimental corpus of fifty-five different German re-translations of Shakespeare's play, Othello. The re-translations date from between 1766 and 2010. A sub-corpus of 32 re-translations has been prepared as a digital parallel corpus. We would like to develop methods of exploring patterns in variation between different translations. In this paper, we develope an interactive focus+context visualization system to present, analyze and explore variation at the level of user-defined segments. From our visualization, we are able to obtain an overview of the relationships of similarity between parallel segments in different versions. We can uncover clusters and outliers at various scales, and a linked focus view allows us to further explore the textual details behind these findings. The domain experts who are studying this topic evaluate our visualizations and we report their feedback. Our system helps them better understand the relationships between different German re-translations of Othello and derive some insight.
Introduction: Non-professional interpreting warrants further study, particularly in environments where professional interpreters are scarce. Method: The lead researcher (a qualified interpreter and counsellor) joined 32 group sessions as a participant observer, and 12 individual sessions as an observer. Additional data sources were 30 semi-structured interviews with counsellors, clients and interpreters, and two halfday forums organised for community interpreters to discuss their concerns. Results: The positive value of engaging non-professional interpreters is highlighted within the specific context of non-medical, community-based, holistic counselling. In this context, formal accuracy of translation is less important than empathy and trust. Non-professional interpreters may be more likely than professionals to share clients’ life experiences, and working with them in counselling has positive psychosocial value for all participants. This is because it entails inclusive, non-hierarchical practices in the client-counsellor-interpreter triad: mutual sharing of linguistic resources and translingual communication, and a more relaxing dynamic with fluid roles. In group sessions, a strong sense of a crosslinguistic community is created as women interpret for one another, an expression of mutual support. In the context of this study, counsellors, clients and interpreters alike all regard non-professionals as being more appropriate than professionals in most counselling situations.
Studying variation among time-evolved translations is a valuable research area for cultural heritage. Understanding how and why translations vary reveals cultural, ideological, and even political influences on literature as well as author relations. In this paper, we introduce a novel integrated visual application to support distant and close reading of a collection of Othello translations. We present a new interactive application that provides an alignment overview of all the translations and their correspondences in parallel with smooth zooming and panning capability to integrate distant and close reading within the same view. We provide a range of filtering and selection options to customize the alignment overview as well as focus on specific subsets. Selection and filtering are responsive to expert user preferences and update the analytical text metrics interactively. Also, we introduce a customized view for close reading which preserves the history of selections and the alignment overview state and enables backtracing and reexamining them. Finally, we present a new Term-Level Comparisons view (TLC) to compare and convey relative term weighting in the context of an alignment. Our visual design is guided by, used and evaluated by a domain expert specialist in German translations of Shakespeare.
This article concerns the trans-editing (simultaneous translation and editing) of coverage of the 2008 US presidential elections on BBC World Service websites. We investigate how English-language source texts were reworked in Arabic, Persian, Tamil, and Turkish, with a detailed analysis of the structuring, content, and rhetoric of a sample text in English and in these other languages. This analysis shows that, while the BBC’s corporate aim is to provide a univocal service across its multilingual output, this aim is in tension with widely differing journalistic norms, and differing assumptions about audience knowledge and needs, in each of the World Service’s language departments. The ‘melody’ remains essentially the same, but it is orchestrated differently by each department.
This essay suggests an alternative to the usual practice of categorising migrant writers by generation, in order to counter the teleological tendency in some recent commentaries on German-Turkish writing which celebrate the youngest writers as the most 'advanced'. Instead I put forward the idea that different writers (and writers at different stages in their careers) adopt different strategies in order to cope with the 'burden of representation' which is imposed on them as migrant/minority artists by the public. I survey German-Turkish novelists, outlining a tentative typology of such strategies. 'Axial writing' (directly thematising migrant experience) is the commonest, and has many sub-varieties, but the alternatives are just as interesting.In memoriam Kemal Kurt This essay 1 explores German-Turkish novelists' responses to the burdens of representation imposed by the social fact of being a German-Turkish novelist. Writers and critics alike often resort to metaphors of the circus and gymnastics -tightrope-walking, doing the splits, balancing acts -to convey the position of artists of hyphenated national/ethnic identity. 2 In the German-Turkish context, these metaphors of performance can be alternatives to the predominant 'bridge' imagery, querying its architectural rigidity. 3 'Juggling' might seem unwarrantedly playful, in a time of intensifying conflict over multiculturalism, migration, and relations between the West and the rest. But perhaps the most valuable achievement of the most interesting hyphenated writers -and others -who tackle these issues is to enable us to 1 Research for this paper was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council through a multi-disciplinary project titled 'Axial Writing' (award number L214252030) within the 'Transnational Communities' research programme based at the University of Oxford (http://www.transcomm. ox.ac.uk). 2 For example: Denn du tanzt auf einem Seil: Positionen deutschsprachiger MigrantInnenliteratur , ed. Sabine Fischer and Moray McGowan, Tübingen 1997; 'Doch seit 150 Jahren streckt sich [die Türkei] auch geistig zwischen Moderne und Tradition, Morgen-und Abendland. Ein Spagat, der den türki-schen
Abstract. Recognized as great works of world literature, Shakespeare's poems and plays have been translated into dozens of languages for over 300 years. Also, there are many re-translations into the same language, for example, there are more than 60 translations of Othello into German. Every translation is a different interpretation of the play. These large quantities of translations reflect changing culture and express individual thought by the authors. They demonstrate wide connections between different world regions today, and reveal a retrospective view of their cultural, intercultural, and linguistic histories. Researchers from Arts and Humanities at Swansea University are collecting a large number of translations of William Shakespeare's Othello. In this paper, we have developed an interactive visualization system to present, analyze and explore the variations among these different translations. Our system is composed of two parts: the structureaware Treemap for document selection and meta data analysis, and Focus + Context parallel coordinates for in-depth document comparison and exploration. In particular, we want to learn more about which content varies highly with each translation, and which content remains stable. We also want to form hypotheses as to the implications behind these variations. Our visualization is evaluated by the domain experts from Arts and Humanities.
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