The Duncan Lawrie International Dagger is an award given by the Crime Writers’ Association for best translated crime novel of the year. The winning author receives an ornamental dagger and £5,000. The translator of the novel is also awarded £1,000. … Read More
The question of fidelity vs. transparency has also been formulated in terms of, respectively, “formal equivalence” and “dynamic equivalence.” The latter two expressions are associated with the translator Eugene Nida and were originally coined to describe ways of translating the … Read More
Word-sense disambiguation concerns finding a suitable translation when a word can have more than one meaning. The problem was first raised in the 1950s by Yehoshua Bar-Hillel.[1] He pointed out that without a “universal encyclopedia”, a machine would never be … Read More
Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher Fidelity (or “faithfulness”) and transparency are two qualities that, for millennia, have been regarded as ideals to be striven for in translation, particularly literary translation. These two ideals are often at odds. Thus a 17th-century French … Read More
Newcomers to translation sometimes proceed as if translation were an exact science — as if consistent, one-to-one correlations existed between the words and phrases of different languages, rendering translations fixed and identically reproducible, much as in cryptography. Such novices may … Read More
Despite being used interchangeably, interpretation and translation are not synonymous, but refer, respectively, to the spoken and written transference of meaning between two languages. Interpreting occurs in real time, in the presence — physical, televised, or telephonic — of the … Read More
The translation process may be stated as: Decoding the meaning of the source text; and Re-encoding this meaning in the target language. Behind this ostensibly simple procedure lies a complex cognitive operation. To decode the meaning of the source text … Read More
The American Translators Association (ATA) was founded in 1959 and is now the largest professional association of translators and interpreters in the United States with more than 10,000 members in 80 countries. Membership is open to anyone with an interest … Read More
Machine translation, sometimes referred to by the abbreviation MT, is a sub-field of computational linguistics that investigates the use of computer software to translate text or speech from one natural language to another. At its basic level, MT performs simple … Read More
