Roberto A. Valdeon

Roberto A. Valdeon
University of Oviedo | UNIOVI · Department of Anglo-Germanic and French Philology

Professor (Translation/Pragmatics)

About

126
Publications
95,910
Reads
How we measure 'reads'
A 'read' is counted each time someone views a publication summary (such as the title, abstract, and list of authors), clicks on a figure, or views or downloads the full-text. Learn more
1,369
Citations
Introduction
Apart from my duties at the University of Oviedo, and my editorial work for Perspectives and for the Benjamins Translation Library, I have been a visiting professor at the University of Leuven (Belgium), associate researcher at the University of Massachusetts (USA) and an honorary professor at Stirling (UK). I am an honorary professor at Jinan in Zhuhai, SCBC Guangzhou, SWUFE in Chengdu (China), and a research associate at the University of the Free State. I am a Fellow of Academia Europaea.
Additional affiliations
September 1990 - present
University of Oviedo
Position
  • Professor
Description
  • Various positions over the past 26 years
September 1988 - August 1990
University of Glasgow
Position
  • Spanish Assistant
February 2016 - present
Benjamins Translation Library
Position
  • General Editor
Education
September 1990 - September 1993
University of Oviedo
Field of study
  • English Studies
September 1988 - June 1990
University of Glasgow
Field of study
  • English Literature and Translation

Publications

Publications (126)
Book
Full-text available
Delving into the uneasy relationship between English and Spanish in the United States of America, this book approaches specific topics from a variety of perspectives, ranging from the more cultural to the more linguistic. The contributions explore the problems arising in Puerto Rico as a consequence of the unique political status of the island; the...
Article
This paper explores the uses of Las Casas’s Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias in the United States of America, with a focus on the Spanish-American War. After introducing the concept of the Black Legend and its use in England, Spain’s main rival in the Americas during the early modern period, I briefly discuss the first two English...
Book
Full-text available
Written by leading experts in the area, The Routledge Handbook of Spanish Translation Studies brings together original contributions representing a culmination of the extensive research to-date within the field of Spanish Translation Studies. The Handbook covers a variety of translation related issues, both theoretical and practical, providing an...
Article
This article has been accepted for publication in Journal of Pragmatics. Drawing on the insights of pragmatics and translation studies, this article discusses the so-called vulgarization hypothesis in audiovisual translation (AVT) of Anglophone products into Spanish and aims to test it for the period 2006-2016. The hypothesis posits that contempor...
Article
Full-text available
This special issue brings together European researchers that have carried out studies into the translation of swearwords from English into Danish, Greek, Italian and Spanish. The articles analyze the strategies used by the translators in a variety of genres, including television series, films, novels and plays. This introduction surveys the most im...
Article
Drawing on the concepts of agenda-setting and framing, this article aims to examine the role played by translation in the selection of articles of the New York Times for the Spanish and Chinese versions. It analyses whether the three versions focus on similar topics and therefore follow a similar agenda, identifies the topics that receive more sali...
Article
This article discusses the challenges that the rendering of the pragmatic implications of texts into a target language posed for human translators and, by extension, for automated translation. It starts by discussing the importance of pragmatics, focusing on two concepts that have received much attention on the part of pragmaticians as well as tran...
Article
Drawing on the concept of “political sectarianism” proposed by Finkel et al. and on Entman’s classification of media biases, this paper aims to study polarization in three mainstream Spanish news websites, i.e. El País, El Mundo and Abc, during the COVID-19 pandemic through a cross-sectional analysis. For that purpose, a corpus of 900 articles was...
Article
This article discusses the difficulties that the divergent conceptualizations of translation in journalism and translation studies pose to conduct inter-disciplinary research into the role of translation practices in journalistic production. It is divided into four sections that review four concepts, namely domestication (in connection with localiz...
Article
This article presents an overview of world literature with regards to comparative and translation studies, notably through the publications of André Lefevere, Susan Bassnett and Edwin Gentzler, as an introduction to this thematic special issue, which showcases the variety of approaches and interests in literature by translation scholars. Although l...
Article
This article aims to analyse the role of translation in the tabloidization of the New York Times in Spanish. Drawing on the findings of a previous study that compared the English, Chinese and Spanish versions of the online newspaper, I hypothesise that the Spanish version focuses on human-interest news items translated from English originals and, t...
Article
This article aims to problematize the role of translation in news production as a result of the invisibility of indirect translation (ITr). In the first section, I argue that in journalistic translation ITr is not merely ‘hidden translation’ but rather ‘ignored translation’ as a consequence of the traditional status of the translational activity in...
Article
Full-text available
This article aims to survey some of the most salient publications on journalistic translation , with a particular focus on the research conducted within translation studies as an academic discipline. This review will also serve to establish a link with the work carried out by journalism scholars, notably the special issue of Journalism published in...
Article
This article presents an overview of audiovisual translation (AVT) as an area of enquiry within Translation Studies. It starts with a brief reference to its historical appearance in the early twentieth century before introducing the main translation modes associated with AVT and its related research. The next sections offer a panorama of some of th...
Article
Full-text available
The aim of this special issue is to explore the complexities of conveying and mediating contemporary political discourse from Chinese to Western contexts and vice versa. Recent research indicates that translation is almost invisible in the field of politics, and therefore the roles of translators in the process of representing and re-contextualisin...
Article
Full-text available
In recent years, several authors have underlined the need for a critical approach to Translation Studies in order to explore power struggles in both source and target languages and cultures. Norman Fairclough's model of discourse analysis offers textual and interpretative procedures for the analy-sis of linguistic features of texts and their societ...
Chapter
Up to now, the Handbook of Translation Studies (HTS) consisted of four volumes, all published between 2010 and 2013. Since research in TS continues to grow and expand, this fifth volume was added in 2021. The HTS aims at disseminating knowledge about translation, interpreting, localization, adaptation, etc. and providing easy access to a large rang...
Article
This article serves to introduce the papers in this special issue, devoted to interpreting studies. Over the past decades, interpreting has gained recognition as an academic field, typically as a branch of translation studies. The paper starts with a brief historical overview of this practice, with a focus on the early modern and the modern periods...
Article
Over the past two decades, the interest in journalistic translation and, more specifically, news translation has produced an important bulk of publications. Although most of this research has originated within translation studies, scholars have conducted interdisciplinary studies drawing on concepts and theoretical frameworks from neighbouring disc...
Article
This article studies the concepts of voice and of the translation pact with regard to Julio Gómez de la Serna’s translation of Obras completas by Oscar Wilde, first published in 1943 after Franco had established his rule of Spain. More precisely, it focuses on the two paratexts that preceded the translations and on the Spanish version of his essay...
Article
Full-text available
This article considers the concept of mediation with regards to the practice of translation. The first section provides examples from various historical periods. The following sections link translation to the concept of gatekeeping in communication studies. This involves a number of agents, who make decisions concerning what material can be publish...
Article
Full-text available
Vol 12, No 2 (2020): Translation & Interpreting Special issue on the politics of translation and the translation of politics Guest Editors: Caterina Calafat & Roberto Valdeón
Article
Full-text available
Translation has played a crucial role in news production, in spite of which research from the perspective of journalism studies is rare. This article starts with a brief overview of the research conducted in translation studies. The next two sections discuss the conceptualization of ‘translation’ in the two disciplines and highlight the historical...
Article
This article provides a survey of the central role that literary translation has played in the consolidation of translation studies research in China. The article starts by considering the importance of the practice of translation of religious texts, notably Buddhist sutras, which were accompanied by reflections on the difficulties they posed and r...
Article
This article studies the role of translation as a first-level gatekeeping mechanism in news production. Contrary to previous views that translation was secondary for the selection and dissemination of news events, it is posited that the translational activity reflects the decisions made by news media, particularly, in the case of services in langua...
Article
Full-text available
This article presents an overview of the publications on journalistic translation research spanning the period 2015-present day. It includes three sections that highlight the main theoretical frameworks and methodological approaches used by researchers, namely discourse analysis and linguistics, sociology, and communication/journalism studies. As r...
Article
Introduction to Target's special issue
Article
This article aims to discuss the importance of pragmatics in translation, paying particular attention to the difficulties posed by two non-clausal units or inserts (Biber et al. 1999). These elements have been classified into nine categories, namely interjections, greetings and farewells, discourse markers, attention signals, response elicitors, re...
Article
Full-text available
This paper discusses ethics in Translation Studies publishing in relation to the "publish or perish" policy enforced by universities and other higher education institutions. After making a distinction between institutional and individual agents, it focuses on the latter (namely authors, editors and referees) by considering their role in the publish...
Article
Full-text available
This paper proposes the use of ad hoc corpora in journalistic translation research (JTR), particularly to analyse content rather than language issues in news texts. To illustrate the validity of an ad hoc corpus as a research tool, this article will survey the articles reporting on the death and funeral of Margaret Thatcher, posted on the website o...
Article
Starting with an overview of F. O. Matthiessen’s work on the role of translation during the Elizabethan period, this article delves into the paratexts of the translations of Spanish colonial texts by Richard Hakluyt, Edward Grimeston, Michael Lok and John Frampton to discuss the underlying reasons why Spanish accounts of the conquest were rendered...
Chapter
Kelly, Michael, Footitt, Hilary, Salama-Carr, Myriam (Eds.) This Handbook maps the contours of an exciting and burgeoning interdisciplinary field concerned with the role of language and languages in situations of conflict. It explores conceptual approaches, sources of information that are available, and the institutions and actors that mediate lang...
Book
Full-text available
This edited collection gathers together, for the first time, the editors of some of the most prestigious Translation Studies journals and serves as a showcase of the academic and geographical diversity of the discipline. The collection includes a discussion on the intralinguistic translation of Romeo and Juliet; thoughts on the concepts of adaptati...
Cover Page
Full-text available
301 Resistance and accommodation: factors for the (non-) adoption of machine translation among professional translators Patrick Cadwell, Sharon O’Brien and Carlos S. C. Teixeira 322 Between language policy and language reality: a corpus-based multivariate study of the interlingual and intralingual subtitling practice in Flanders Lynn Prieels and Ge...
Article
Full-text available
This brief article serves to introduce the papers selected for the special issue devoted to topics and concepts in literary translation. The texts study a variety of languages (including English, Spanish, Italian, Chinese, French, Japanese, Dutch, German and Swedish), use a wide range of approaches (quantitative review of literary translations; tra...
Chapter
A History of Modern Translation Knowledge is the first attempt to map the coming into being of modern thinking about translation. It breaks with the well-established tradition of viewing history through the reductive lens of schools, theories, turns or interdisciplinary exchanges. It also challenges the artificial distinction between past and prese...
Chapter
The coming of age of audiovisual translation studies has brought about a much-needed surge of studies focusing on the audience, their comprehension, appreciation or rejection of what reaches them through the medium of translation. Although complex to perform, studies on the reception of translated audiovisual texts offer a uniquely thorough picture...
Chapter
Editors' introduction: "‘Translation and culture in mainstream media and journalism’ addresses ‘the importance of translation in global mass media networks and products’, focusing specifically on the sub-areas of audiovisual translation and journalistic translation. Foremost in his first part are issues such as the management of otherness: multilin...
Article
Drawing on Michael Cronin’s analysis of Stagecoach, and on narrative theory and image studies, this paper aims to examine the role of language and translation in two classical Hollywood westerns, namely They Died with Their Boots On and Fort Apache. It will consider whether these films provide only negative representations of Native Americans and w...
Article
Full-text available
This article studies the paratexts of the translations of Don Quijote into English by John Stevens and John Phillips, and of the translations of Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias by John Phillips and Crónica del Perú by John Stevens. It draws on the work of Gérard Genette, who discussed the use of paratexts in literary studies, and...
Article
Full-text available
Starting from the consolidation of journalistic translation as a subarea of research within translation studies and the calls for interdisciplinary approaches to the analysis of news texts, this article interrogates the lack of interaction between translation and journalism studies by examining the use of the term 'translation' in the latter. After...
Article
This article explores the uses of Las Casas’s Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias in the United States of America, with a focus on the Spanish-American War. After introducing the concept of the Black Legend and its use in England, Spain’s main rival in the Americas during the early modern period, I briefly discuss the first two Engli...
Chapter
The notion of voice has been used in a number of ways within Translation Studies. Against the backdrop of these different uses, this book looks at the voices of translators, authors, publishers, editors and readers both in the translations themselves and in the texts that surround these translations. The various authors go on a hunt for translation...
Chapter
Discourse analytic approaches are central to translator training and translation analysis, but have been somewhat overlooked in recent translation studies. This volume sets out to rectify this marginalization. It considers the evolution of the use of discourse analysis in translation studies, presents current research from ten leading figures in th...
Book
Full-text available
UNCORRECTED PROOFS OF CONTENTS AND INTRO Chinese Translation Studies in the 21st Century, which presents a selection of some of the best articles published in the journal Perspectives in a five-year period (2012-2017), highlights the vitality of Translation Studies as a profession and as a field of enquiry in China. As the country has gradually op...
Article
Full-text available
This article presents some of the problems that have characterized Translation Studies (TS) as an academic discipline in the past 25 years, such as its fragmentation and its commodification, as researchers have been compelled to publish in high impact journals owned by large media corporations. On the other hand, Translation Studies has expanded ge...
Chapter
This chapter presents an overview of the research concerning the interface between Translation Studies and Pragmatics, with particular reference to the translation of fiction. The first section discusses how the main reference books of the discipline have dealt with the topic and highlights the work of authors who have given prominence to the cruci...
Presentation
Full-text available
Since James Holmes proposed the term and a mapping of the discipline, Translation Studies has become a consolidated field of enquiry. In the 1950s and 1960s translation was mainly studied from a linguistic perspective, while towards the end of the twentieth century the cultural turn focused on the role of culture in the translation process. This ta...
Article
This paper examines the translation of economic texts authored by Nobel Prize winner Paul Krugman, published originally by The New York Times in both their printed and Internet editions, and in Spanish by El País . It comprises a small parallel corpus of eighteen original columns and their equivalent Spanish versions, a total of 31,196 words. The a...
Research
Full-text available
Note that the preliminary programme, which will be updated soon at our web site, can be found at: http://www.uibcongres.org/congresos/programa.en.html?cc=383&
Chapter
This paper discusses the construction of a new national image of Spain for an international audience, as presented in the English version of the leading Spanish paper El País. It will have recourse to the concept of framing as used in communication studies, on the one hand, and in translation studies, on the other. In the former frames are defined...
Article
Full-text available
This article discusses the distinction stable versus unstable sources, which Hernández Guerrero has suggested in her book on news translation. It starts with a short overview of news translation as a subfield within the discipline of translation studies, emphasizing the role of translation in news production since the emergence of the journalistic...
Article
Full-text available
This paper proposes the use of translation as an exercise capable of raising students’ awareness of pragmatic differences between English and Spanish, with particular emphasis on taboo words, rarely studied in a formal environment. This difficult area of the L2 has been brought to the fore after the publication of two corpus-driven grammars (Biber...
Article
Full-text available
This paper surveys the emergence and development of journalistic translation research (JTR), focusing on the publications of the past 15 years. Journalistic translation has managed to establish itself as a subarea of research within Translation Studies, as the entries in the major encyclopedias and handbooks attest. Translation contributed to the b...
Article
Full-text available
This paper examines the role of museums in the creation of anglophone stories in the USA, and how the (non-)translation of signs contributes to create a narrative of exclusion vis-à-vis other groups, notably native Americans, the Spanish, and the French. Particular attention is paid to open-air museums that preserve old buildings and areas reminisc...
Article
Full-text available
The 19th century Book of Mormon, which was at the base of the creation and spread of a new religious movement in the United States, has been used as an example of what translation scholars have called pseudo-translations (Toury 1995, 2005; Hermans 2007; Vidal 2010). However, the Mormon canon is based upon other documents, also presented as translat...
Book
Full-text available
Two are the starting points of this book. On the one hand, the use of Doña Marina/La Malinche as a symbol of the violation of the Americas by the Spanish conquerors as well as a metaphor of her treason to the Mexican people. On the other, the role of the translations of Bartolomé de las Casas’s Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias in...
Article
Full-text available
Terminological issues are problematic in the analysis of translation processes in news production. In the 1980s, Stetting coined the term “transediting”, which has been widely used in the translation studies literature, but “translation” itself becomes contentious in communication studies, a discipline closely related to news translation research....
Article
Full-text available
In the 1970s, the American Census Bureau first used the term Hispanic to refer to individuals residing in the USA although born in or descending from Spanish-speaking countries. This paper explores the use of Hispanic and Latino (and to a lesser extent Latin American) in US official documents and quality news outlets within the framework of narrati...
Article
Full-text available
This paper provides a historiographical approach to the figure of Doña Marina or La Malinche, the interpreter of Hernán Cortés during the conquest of Mexico, in order to reassess the fictionalization of the character that we often find in Translation Studies. It is argued that this discipline has used her name in an impressionistic way and, therefo...
Article
Full-text available
This paper addresses the issue of terms, namely Latin American, Hispanic and Latino, whose definitions are affected by social, economic, historical and ideological factors and which are at the crossroads of two or more disciplines. Definitions will be provided, using the Merriam-Webster for American English, the Oxford Dictionary for British Englis...
Article
Full-text available
Since the sixteenth century the Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias (1552) by Bartolomé de las Casas (1484–1566) has been translated into English several times. This article analyses the 1992 retranslation by Nigel Griffin. My working hypothesis is that contemporary translations of the text find it hard to resist the anti-Spanish nar...
Article
Full-text available
This article provides a overview of the role translation has played in news transmission since the birth of journalism until the 21st century. The paper focuses on three periods and the ways in which translation has been present in news production: (1) translation at the origin of newspapers in 17th- and 18th-century Europe, with particular referen...
Article
Full-text available
This paper explores the ideological transformations which have been carried out in producing Tears of the Indies, one of the first English translations of Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias by the Dominican Bartolomé de las Casas, a tract which he addressed to the future King Philip II, and in which he denounced the actions of the c...
Chapter
As a meaningful manifestation of how institutionalized the discipline has become, the new Handbook of Translation Studies is most welcome. It joins the other signs of maturation such as Summer Schools, the development of academic curricula, historical surveys, journals, book series, textbooks, terminologies, bibliographies and encyclopedias. The HT...
Article
Full-text available
In his 2008 book, Translation and Identity in the Americas , Edwin Gentzler proposed a “fictional turn” to refer to translation in connection with the construction of identity in the Americas, a highly positive view of the role played by this activity since the arrival of the Europeans. This paper proposes a “fictionalizing twist,” that is, a compl...
Article
Full-text available
This paper examines the use of three dysfluencies, namely interruptions, unfinished utterances and repeats (Biber et al., 1999, pp. 1052–1066), in Anglophone audiovisual fiction and their translation into Spanish. After introducing the elements and their relevance in the colloquial mode, both in English (following Biber et al., 1999; Carter & McCar...
Article
This paper examines the connection between translation and narratives of history, with particular attention to Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States and its Spanish version, La otra historia de los Estados Unidos. It is argued that translation interacts with history in many ways: translation is fundamental to history and, in additio...
Article
Full-text available
This paper aims to examine the clash between languages and cultures as identified in the treatment of news events, with particular reference to the Falklands, or Malvinas in their Spanish denomination, in British and Spanish Internet news portals. English, as a global language, and Spanish, as its main European rival, exemplify a conflict between t...
Article
Full-text available
This paper explores the role of translation in the informational era (Webster 2006a, 2006b; Castells 2009, 2010a, 2010b). The first section surveys the place of informative texts within Translation Studies, starting with Reiss's (1976) text type taxonomy. The second section discusses the concept of the informational society, as characteristic of th...
Article
Full-text available
This article examines the translational choices in the Spanish dubbed version of the American sitcom Will & Grace for the terms ‘gay’, ‘homosexual’, ‘queer’ and ‘fag’. Firstly, I introduce the main features of the programme before moving on to present research on gay-related issues within Translation Studies. Drawing on Fairclough’s approach to dis...
Article
Full-text available
This article presents an overview of the literary controversy surrounding the publication of E. M. Forster's so-called homosexual novel, Maurice, in 1971 and its subsequent publication in Spanish. Some critics published revisionist works in which his other novels were presented in the light of the revelations about Forster's own homosexuality where...

Questions

Question (1)
Question
I have been receiving dozens of messages from this journal:
Betty Liu Communications Editor Forum for Linguistic Studies ISSN: 2705-0602 (Online) ISSN: 2705-0610 (Print)
I have repeatedly asked them to stop pestering with messages asking me to submit articles or to review papers. I have written to the editor of the journal. To no avail. They keep harassing me with messages. It is now bordering on the criminal.

Network

Cited By