Bøger i TransÜD. Arbeiten zur Theorie und Praxis des Übersetzens und Dolmetschens serien

The nature of interaction between authors and readers of written texts varies from language to language. This is particularly evident in specialized texts and their translations. Mehrdad Vasheghani Farahani unveils the distributional pattern of metadiscourse features as well as the writer-reader interaction in translations of legal and political texts in an English-Persian context. Using a corpus-based methodology and resorting to parallel and reference corpora, he explores systematically the use of metadiscourse features and their distribution in original texts and in translations in English and Persian. In addition, parallel concordance lines are used to examine the way writer-reader interaction is constructed and guided in translation and non-translation language in English and Persian.

As something that surrounds, extends, and presents a text to the world, the phenomenon of paratext is gaining more and more attention within the discipline of Translation Studies. This edited volume, with contributions by five Nordic scholars, aims to build on that attention by presenting five case studies on paratexts in translations into Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish. A special focus lies on the paratextual mechanisms at play when works from different source cultures are translated into a Nordic target context. The translated works under scrutiny belong to genres such as literary novels, non-­fiction works, and religious texts, and the paratexts surveyed include footnotes, covers, blurbs, introductions, and literary reviews. The scholars represented in the volume all work in Translation Studies, or at the intersection between Translation Studies and other disciplines.

Translations of the Bible take place in the midst of tension between politics, ideology and power. With the theological authority of the book as God¿s Word, not focusing on the process of translating is stating the obvious. Inclinations, fluency and zeitgeist play as serious a role as translators¿ person, faith and worldview, as do their vocabulary, poetics and linguistic capacity. History has seen countless retranslations of the Bible. What are the considerations according to which Biblical retranslations are being produced in current, 21st century, contexts? From retranslations of the Hebrew Bible to those of the Old and New Testaments, to mutual influences of Christian and Jewish translational traditions ¿ the papers collected here all deal with the question of what is to be [re]gained with the production of a new translation where, at times, many a previous one has already existed.

Linguistic minorities are everywhere, and they are diverse. In this context, linguistic mediation activities ¿ whether translation or interpreting ¿ are key to the social inclusion of any kind of linguistic minority. In most societies autochthonous linguistic minorities coexist with foreign-speaking minorities and people with (or without) dis­abilities who rely linguistically or medially adapted on texts to access information. The present volume draws on this broad understanding of the concept of linguistic minorities to explore some of the newest developments in the field of translation studies and linguistics. The articles are structured around three main axes: ¿ accessibility of content, especially audiovisual translation¿ intralingual translation, including initiatives regarding plain language, easy-to-read and easy language¿ mediation for minorities in a broader sense and language ideologies.

Karin Michaëlis (1872¿1950) was one of the most important Danish authors of the early 20th century and achieved enormous international success with her Bibi books about the life and adventures of a free-spirited Danish girl named Bibi. The series was not particularly popular in the author¿s native country, however. This book unravels the intricate reasons behind the strikingly asymmetrical reception of the Bibi series at home and abroad while at the same time deconstructing this home-abroad dichotomy by showing that the Bibi books are an example of transnational children¿s literature. They did not have their ¿home¿ in Denmark in that Karin Michaëlis wrote them specifically for foreign publishers, first and foremost the German Herbert Stuffer. The book further argues that the Danish texts are rewritings rather than originals and explores some of the salient textual features of the Danish and German Bibi books. Finally, it examines the series¿ reception by young Italian readers in Fascist Italy and Karin Michaëlis¿ Italian translator.

Taking the perspective of others is central to translation. But does translation train this uniquely human capacity? This book introduces the concept of Theory of Mind (ToM) to model one of the central features of translation, the meta-representation of others, and presents three innovative studies which investigate the question using brain scans, eye-tracking and key-logging to shed new light on the role of non-linguistic macro-competences on the trans­lation process.

The contributions in this volume set out to understand and map parts of the vast territory of specialized communication that have yet to be charted from a research perspective. Specific aspects from the fields of translation studies, technical communication and accessibility are explored from different perspectives bringing new insights into how we conceptualize the practice of technical writing and translation. The findings of this expedition are of interest to researchers, practitioners and students of specialized communication.