From Pro Loco to Pro Globo

Abstract

The status of English as an international language means that in language learning and translational contexts it has become a moving target. Within translational contexts the issue is especially relevant to translations into English where the envisaged readership is international. This paper discusses issues which arise from translations of Italian tourist texts into English submitted by a group of advanced-level Italian university students. Translation of this nature entails a transition from the local to the global for the benefit of mostly non-native speakers of English, but such a shift is not without complications. One of these is that from an early age Italian students are nurtured on Standard British English and that codified target-language parameters are easily accessed for Standard British English, but not for English as a Lingua Franca (ELF). At the same time, knee-jerk insistence on a major variety of English has its pitfalls; the translator must be sensitive to the fact that the envisaged target readers, extremely heterogeneous on account of their vastly different levels of linguistic and cultural competence, may read off diverse meanings from a single text, or at least react to it in diverse ways. The second half of the paper provides a range of examples of student translations into English for an envisaged international readership.

Die Politik der Buchübersetzung

“…Ähnliche Erkenntnisse macht Queiroz de Barros für das geisteswissenschaftliche Personal an der Universität von Lissabon, wo 63 % der Teilnehmer*innen der Studie das Englische als Lingua franca begrüßen, obwohl gleich viele angeben, dass portugiesische Forscher*innen lieber auf Portugiesisch publizieren (Queiroz de Barros 2014, 116 f.). Auch Wolfgang Pöckl (2011) (Hewson 2009;Stewart 2013), Hewson und Michaela Albl-Mikasa ergründen die Anforderungen des »Marktes« an Übersetzungen in und aus der Lingua franca (Hewson 2013;Albl-Mikasa 2010), Karin Reithofer untersucht den Status des Berufes Übersetzer*in in Konkurrenz zur Nutzung einer Lingua franca (Reithofer 2010) und Amanda C. Murphy ergründet die Fertigkeiten (Murphy 2013) und Bennett die (kritischen) Fähigkeiten (Bennett 2013), die angehenden Übersetzer*innen und Dolmetscher*innen mitgegeben werden können, wenn es um die Dominanz einer Sprache als Kommunikationssprache geht.…”

An Exploration of Lingua-Cultures on YouTube: Translation and Assemblages

“…Even though YouTube provides a setting for the simultaneous circulation of media content across geographical borders and for the gathering of people from different lingua-cultural backgrounds around such content, actual encounters and interactions between them are based upon the premise that lingua-cultural barriers are bridged or removed. In this context, the use of a lingua francathat is, "a contact or vehicular language" (House, 2013, p. 280) used by a group of various speakers whose language levels are different for a communicative purpose (see Stewart, 2013)and translation plays a pivotal role in facilitating global exchange by enabling people to overcome the communication barriers originating from linguistic differences. In other words, a lingua franca and translation-including translation into and from the lingua franca-may significantly influence the processes of deconstructing and reconstructing the boundaries of spaces in which heterogeneous individuals engage with media content and form collectivities around such content.…”