Problems and strategies in public service interpreting as perceived by a sample of Chinese-Catalan/Spanish interpreters

Problems and strategies have been widely discussed in Translation and Interpreting Studies, but they have received scarce attention in the field of Public Service Interpreting (PSI). On the basis of interviews with 20 public service interpreters working in the Chinese-Catalan/Spanish combination, this article analyses their answers in relation to the problems and difficulties they usually encounter, which are classified into two categories: word level and discourse level. Different ideas on curriculum design and training approaches are suggested and discussed on the basis of this analysis, while also considering that most interpreters had not received formal training in PSI at the moment of the interviews.This work was supported by the Catalan Agency for Administration of University and Research Grants (AGAUR) under Grant [2014SGR545] to MIRAS research group

A corpus study of splitting and joining sentences in translation

The use of corpora in translation studies has risen dramatically over the past years, contributing towards a growing body of empirical research focusing not only on what differentiates translated from non-translated language, but also on the changes or shifts that translators make from source to target texts. Most of the latter studies are centred on sub-sentential elements, such as the contrastive use of particular lexis or grammar. However, translation shifts can transcend the level of the sentence. For example, sentences can be split or joined in translation, or there can be complex shifts that combine the two. While there is some research on sentence splitting, there do not seem to be many studies about sentence joining, or indeed sentence splitting and joining together. The present study seeks to address this gap. Using a bidirectional parallel corpus of Portuguese and English fiction, over 90 thousand source-text sentences and their corresponding text in translation were analysed from a quantitative perspective, and a closer look was taken at a sample of over one thousand parallel text segments involving sentence joining and splitting. The main findings were that in both translation directions (1) there was a strong tendency for sentence preservation, (2) the differences between sentence splitting and joining were not significant, and (3) changes in sentence boundaries were predominantly associated with the standardization or normalization of syntax and a tendency for explicitation