Our member, Morten Beckmann, has been interviewed by the Norwegian newspaper Vårt Land. He talked about how his research on Bible translation has made an impact on the revision of the religious book.
He has also written an opinion piece in which he discusses how these revisions can affect the reader’s interpretation of texts pertaining to Jesus and damnation.
To read more about it: https://www.vl.no/meninger/verdidebatt/2022/11/15/na-kommer-bibelselskapets-mest-radikale-bibelrevisjon-noensinne/
On November 15, Prof. Sandra Halverson talked about translation and power at the Collets Kafé. The event was held at the local theatre in Kristiansand and was part of a series of gatherings where academics from the University of Agder can talk about their research.
The talk focused on the two main arenas in which power relationships are played out in the creation and use of translated texts. The first is the linguistic/communicative power that the translator exercises through her linguistic/semiotic choices. The second is the social power through which various stakeholders at the national level, through legislation, institutions, organizations, and more or less articulated norms, make decisions about what texts are to be translated into and out of Norwegian and by whom. The consequences at both levels have important ramifications, for example in the ways in which members of the Norwegian society experience the world through translated text and in the safeguarding of basic rights and services for the country’s residents.
Professor Halverson, our group leader, delivered an online talk with the title (Cognitive) linguistic theory in Translation Studies. It was part of the lectures Translation and Cognition; Translation and Corpora organized by the Institute of Translation Studies (Institut für Translationswissenschaft) at the University of Innsbruck.
The talk addressed the way Translation and Interpreting Studies should move forward to find a solution against the fragmentation of the field.
As well-established and empirically supported, usage-based approaches typical of Cognitive Linguistics could provide a common theoretical background that is grounded in socio-cognitive ontologies.
This theory is discussed in further detail in Sociocognitive Constructs in Translation and Interpreting Studies (TIS), published together with Professor Kotze.
Our newest member, Chiara Astrid Gebbia, delivered a keynote talk at the Young Researchers Night on the International Day of Translation (30 September). The event in Kristiansand was one of several taking place throughout Norway to promote the development of researchers during their early-stage careers. During her talk, Chiara explained how metaphors pervade our everyday communication, decision-making, and professional identity formation. She also presented her postdoctoral project conducted within the AFO group in which she addresses translators’ metaphorical selves.
The night proceeded with a roundtable discussion with the other two keynote speakers, Hanne Stensola and Jeppe Have Rasmussen, on how to navigate the ocean of research.
A few days before the International Day for Interpretation and Translation (30 September), AFO supported the initiative of OsloMet to pursue sustainability in the interpreting field. The event unfolded through several talks that addressed equal rights in legal translation and the role of interpreting both in the Sami culture and in the humanitarian crisis caused by the conflict in Ukraine.
During the event, speakers from different cultures and fields also discussed how to improve Norwegian interpreters’ working conditions by following the UN development guidelines for sustainability.
Sandra Halverson, our group leader, and Haidee Kotze run a roundtable during the conference Translation in Transition 2022 held in Prague on 22-23 September. The discussion called for a common theoretical framework in Translation Studies, an issue that has been overlooked at the advantage of methodological sophistication. Five major translation scholars took part in the roundtable: Hanna Risku, Stella Neumann, Bogusława Whyatt, Gert De Sutter, and Oliver Czulo.
Jean Nitzke also delivered a paper entitled Decisions in post-editing projects: Using semi-structured interviews with stakeholders from the language industry to update a decision tree model for post-editing tasks. This interview study, conducted with Carmen Canfora and Silvia Hansen-Schirra, revealed to which extent postediting is used in translation projects. It also stressed what the deciding factors are for outlining these projects.
On August 30, Anu Carnegie-Brown, Managing Director at Sandberg Translation Partners Ltd, held a webinar for students in the MA program in Translation and Professional Communication, ran by AFO members at the University of Agder. During her webinar, Anu introduced students to the intricacies of today’s language services industry, not least the speed at which the global translation market is growing and changing.
Anu began with an overview of the different services that the language industry offers, ranging from translation to content creation. She proceeded to examine the relationships among the different vendors involved in the translation process and surveyed the various specializations that make up professional ecosystems in most language service providers. Lastly, Anu described the roles of reviser or project manager and explained how the execution of these roles is assessed. The last section of the webinar was particularly relevant to translation students considering their furture career prospects.
Professor Haidee Kotze (University of Utrecht) visited UiA on 16 August to present her research to AFO members, who were able to engage in depth with her work during the Q&A sessions that followed her presentations.
The first session reported on one of Professor Kotze and colleagues’ latest publications, where they investigate readers’ reception of literary work and underline the extent to which fluency, assimilation and invisibility are still predominant normative constructs in the literary translation landscape.
In the second session, Professor Kotze provided insights on the controversy that erupted following the choice of translators for Amanda Gorman’s The Hill We Climb around the world. The debate, which was prompted virtually in the Netherlands, resonated globally for shedding light on pressing issues concerning the representation of personal and collective experiential knowledge of minoritized groups. As extensively discussed in Professor Kotze’s Medium piece, such controversies might be deeply interwoven with the lack of equitable and diverse representativeness that characterizes the ‘rooms’ of the translation industry.
Professor Barbara J. Gawronska has recently published an article in Polylogue. Neophilological Studies.
(2022) ‘The World of George Grosz’s Pictures and the World Depicted in the Novel Pokora by Szczepan Twardoch: A Case Study of Paratextual Relations’, Polylogue 12: 153-168.
In June, AFO members spent an eventful week in Oslo. On Tuesday 21 June they took part in the founding meeting of the Norsk nettverk for oversettelses- og tolkeforskning (Norwegian Association for Translation and Interpreting Research). After more than a year of preparation that began with an online meeting in June 2021, translation scholars from more than ten Norwegian research institutions came together to bring the network officially into being. The network connects translation and interpreting academics from all over the country and aims to create new opportunities for exchange and collaboration on a number of pedagogical and research fronts.
The week proceeded with the 2022 EST Conference (Advancing Translation Studies), one of the biggest international events in translation studies, which held every third year. Three members of the research group took the opportunity to present their research. Erlend Wichne delivered a paper entitled ‘The Re-creation of the Foreign. The Gjendikting Concept and State-funded Literature in Norway”. Jean Nitzke and her former colleagues from the University of Mainz spoke about ‘Revisiting the Decision Tree Model for Post-editing Tasks: What Can the Language Industry Teach Us?’. And Sandra Halverson contributed to two presentations on site –– ‘Investigating Default Translation in Keylogs: Developing a Method’ with Claudia Förster Hegrenæs and ‘Building a Usage-based Theory of Translation: Foundations in and Developments from Descriptive Translation Studies’ with Haidee Kotze –– and to one online presentation entitled ‘Lexical Bundles in Formulaic Interpreting: A Corpus-based Descriptive Exploration” with Yang Li.
